gift guide: for the poet in ur life

plus round-up!

Despy Boutris

Jun 20, 2022

Happy Monday, all!

I have a smattering of things for you today:

Housekeeping
Opportunities
What I’m reading
Quotations
Tweets

Housekeeping:

I’m still in Europe & it’s still beautiful.

dbouts

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dbouts

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Gift guide for poets:

My birthday’s coming up, & serendipitously I just found this great resource (x) from Caelan Ernest on what to gift poets:

Give them a membership to a local museum or theater
Buy more of their favorite pen, or a special pen on their wishlist
Give them money to go toward application fees or rent
Gift certificate to a local bookstore or coffeeshop
Stock them up on their go-to beverage, or surprise them with a special beverage (psst... only give alcohol if you know for sure they'd welcome that)
Help them arrange or afford time to themselves to write
Really nice headphones
Bath bubbles
Supplies for their pet(s)
Clothing (think a comfort item or a conversation piece)
Their favorite food delivered to them at home/restaurant gift cards
A massage or a manicure
Art supplies

ETA: Personally, I would also enjoy European gummies, a subscription to Peacock or AMC+, cool vegan snacks, offers of marriage (assuming you can offer me good healthcare), candles, someone paying for my tattoos, some Xanax, plane tickets to anywhere, & whimsical coffee mugs.

ETA: Please stop gifting us random notebooks.

Anyways,

here’s my Amazon wishlist. xo.

Opportunities:

Claire Wade @clairerwade: Submissions are open for the 2nd Disability Issue of @thebookseller The theme is increasing accessibility & inclusivity of disabled people within the publishing industry. I’m looking for article pitches by disabled authors, agents, editors, publishing employees & booksellers. I’m particularly interested in pieces about: *the obstacles disabled people face - whether that’s to do with getting published, navigating the process, attending events, lack of opportunities etc. As well as raising the issue I’m keen to include ideas on how to overcome them. *what’s being done well and how it can be extended. £120/500 words. Please send a one paragraph pitch and a short bio to disabledauthors@gmail.com Closing date Friday 8th July 2022. Further Details By disabled I mean anyone who self-identifies as disabled. The Bookseller is a trade magazine for the UK publishing industry. Last year I had over a hundred pitches and the successful ones were aimed at those working in the industry They addressed one specific issue - the word count is too limited to tackle everything at once. The writers used their personal experience to back up the article but the focus was on more than just their own story. To see a list of the articles (and subjects) we published last year visit clairewade.com/adci (June 16)

What I’m reading:

The Men: First Impressions and Spoilers

The Lauren Hough/Lambda drama is wild but also, like, The Men sounds like a really outdated concept—and not even a very original one at that.

Quotations:

lips freshly smudged / afro smushed from the fist / of fingers
you wanted in / your mouth

-deziree a. brown

I ask her how it feels / to be a hundred tons
of doom / and she chuckles / black women
have always been titans

-deziree a. brown

Yes, I was utterly wrong,
I thought that humans were vertical wounds
against the horizon, feeding their own fissures
with wood and coal.

-Javier F. Gonzalez

So, I am not much of a quotes person. I am firmly against epigrams in a very superstitious way. I'm not willing yet to give someone more famous and smarter than me the first chance to speak in my novels!

-Megan Giddings

Did I say me? Things
have been getting
less and less hypothetical
since I unhitched myself
from your bedpost.

-Kaveh Akbar

Everyone
I love is too modern
to be caught
grieving.

-Kaveh Akbar

In order
to be consumed
first you need to be consumable,
but there is not a single
part of you I could fit
in my mouth.

-Kaveh Akbar

I still want
to suck the bones out
from your hands,
plant them like the seeds
we found in an antique
textbook, though those
never sprouted ad may not
have even been seeds.

-Kaveh Akbar

I go to the barber and say, Barber,
make me a better man. Make me genius.
Make me patient. I want my
skin to always be soft
on the inside. I want a fade
in the back. To always smell
like rhubarb pie. I want to love
my life forever.
Can you do that?

-Oliver Baez Bendorf