New Jerseys everywhere + skepticism/faith + what is not-reading
Today not an essay but a handful of things:
1 I’ve gotten to see some of you this fall at readings, gatherings, Zoom chats, exchanges of letters, a phone with your name on the screen. A dream. Thank you and let’s do more of everything please. I have one more book event upcoming, at the beautiful indie Labyrinth Books in Princeton, NJ, Tues 12/6 at 6 pm, with Adrienne Raphel, talking about class, play, power, & language—academia and its margins & dreamings—in relation to my Hole Studies and her Our Dark Academia. If you/a friend are in the NJ-ish area, perhaps we’ll see you—and also it is streaming online, I think, info here.
2 An essay about Sinéad O’Connor, loneliness, and forms of love in Astra. (Excerpted, more or less, from the book.)
3 I often say, at least to myself, that my first three books were about reading. This seems like evidence of an unresolved relationship. Like a lot of writer-types—have you also talked about this?—when people ask me what I’ve been reading, my mind often quits, like, my gut feeling is: oh, I can’t read, I never read. Even though it’s provably true that I read a lot, and even for money. The relationship is endlessly fraught which is also its endless potential. I was thinking the other day that perhaps a person who regularly continually reads poetry is, rather than naturally a believer in poetry, naturally a skeptic. (Poetry as a stand-in for literature, here.) We read because we need to believe again. Our skepticism has been overcome so powerfully in the past. If we were natural believers, we could read one poem (as people sometimes ask you to, at a wedding or funeral), we could treasure a few precious things, but because our faith is uncertain, we must test and test it. We are drawn back by the strength of our skepticism and what we know about it, which is that our faith—our bright sudden transformative love and humility—could and can be as strong. Whenever I write a book, say, I am trying to learn why someone would write a book. The previous books no longer work, for me, to respond to the question. This thought was occasioned on reading Hajar Hussaini’s new book, her debut, Disbound. On reading this book, I thought, this is why people write and read books. She has made something extraordinary. You could never have predicted it. Having set up a question for herself (or perhaps one should put it like: having through great courage and power framed a question into which she had been thrust), she pursued it, she took us all with her as far as anyone could go. Reading this book, I thought, I believe again. It was not easy, since on opening it like opening any book I was naturally ready for all sorts of non-transcendent, even banal, fine-enough experiences. I was not a believer and became one again. This is why/how I’m never reading and keep reading.
4 Similarly, I want to point people to the book Free Clean Fill Dirt by my friend Caryl Pagel. It too just came out; I read it some time ago, and it stays very alive in/with me, a site of needed questions, a form for living in.
5 Statistics: in the past 13 months, I’ve read 36 detective/crime novels, almost always when I had a migraine (which is about 1 out of 4 days). What does one do with this? Last year I tried to review all my sick books. If anyone would like some crime novel recs, I have some. If anyone can think of a meaning for this horde of ill reading, please say.
6 In 2023 a book of poems I wrote is coming out, Excisions. It is here. I think this book is about thresholds—a storm of hello—a way that something of yourself is gone from you yet you’re what remains. Hello. Poems are very hard to write but I felt especially alive when trying, which is a lucky experience.
And PS, if you are in Cleveland, Hajar Hussaini is reading, with the wonderful poet Alen Hamza, this upcoming Friday 12/2, more here.
… Before I go, some other astonishing books the past year or so has brought me, and which I must have read, I can’t remember which I may have mentioned already: Caren Beilin, Revenge of the Scapegoat; Joseph Earl Thomas, Sink; Robin McLean, Pity the Beast; Patrick Radden Keefe, Say Nothing; Dot Devota, PMS; Hayan Charara, These Trees, Those Leaves, This Flower, That Fruit; Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (trans. Elisabeth Jaquette); Heike Geissler, Seasonal Associate (trans. Katy Derbyshire)…