May Zine Reading -- Great Start!

Finally! Zine season has begun. This morning I started in on my stack of Etsy poetry books/zines and lucked out with the first two.

Starting with The Untier of Impossible Knots, which has a perfect cover illustration--these are poems to lift overhead and read and then pause to see what you're thinking or feeling. My favorite poem in this balances between "Today Four Crows" and "Never Trust a Vehicle" but enjoyed the volume as a whole; it's the kind of volume you can return to and find a different favorite for the day, a bit of solace, or a concept to think through. Would recommend.

Maybe you don't do this...but I worry that the next book you select after one you enjoyed will suffer for being next. But...there's the basket of poetry and Anna Bayuk's Venus of the Swamp was waiting. I read the back first--Ms. Bayuk was the 2020 South Florida Youth Poet Laureate. So far, so good. Lovely cover. It includes art and poems! She has a gift for selecting images that chime with her words and the poems are great. I wish I could have written them. I wish even more I could have read them when I was younger. Would recommend.

There are several more waiting to be read...more tomorrow? Looking forward to more discoveries.

-- chrissa

Comments

Turn Away

Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm. Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story. Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in...

The Soul and The Spine

Sharing with The Sunday Muse #195 . Come and share! When it blew out the candle, It began to speak, voice low, eyes dimmer than flame. Jenn believed, once upon a childhood (she's still there... but it's waning), it inhaled fire. Spines, tonight. Gears ladder bones and metal and plastic, all that lived, rungs to heaven. Heaven is a level of space where you can't breathe so they used to send the dead. When the flame goes, it takes our memories with it. But not bot files. Maybe it believes she'll sleep easier if bots go breathless, too. It continues murmuring and she pretends she's hearing a confession in a box Like the song her mother plays when the dark stretches between signals We can handle shocks. She can handle the dark, the small not-flame of its eyes. It's finally winter!! Which means bitmapped frost on the roofs, cold mornings, and a table full of succulents that are pretty much glaring at me because the kitchen window isn't the same as full su...

A Single (Terrible) Poem

I did not buy the poetry book whose sample Was page after page of essay and praise. I'm not following the trumpets. Today I follow the ringers-- Huzzah and call out the streets! Lift your arm, swing the bell; Call out the quiet, call out the neat Call out the loud, call out the bold Call out the wrong, call out the wise We remember the bells We shiver the skies. This isn't about...anything. It's not about nothing. It should go without saying that a poem shouldn't need an essay or a textbook to be what it is. And I'm not sure why, with a stack of poetry at hand to be read, one silly Kindle sample (and writer's block and anxiety and...) would push my buttons so badly. But seriously. Where is my parody book full of fake blurbs that runs for 50 pages and ends with a single (terrible) poem? -- Chrissa

A Weed on The Curb

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