Here is one of my favorite Adrian Sobol poems. It’s called “that joke isn’t funny anymore.”

after you're sick
of the sea

there's this:
more sea

It’s the first poem in Adrian’s second collection, Hair Shirt (Malarkey 2025). I like it because it’s funny and shifting, dare I say protean. Right now, of course, it feels like it’s about the Odyssey. It occurs to me that someone who has only seen the Christopher Nolan film, which I did love, might not make the connection from protean to the Odyssey because Nolan didn’t include the scene with Proteus, the shape-shifter. He also left out my favorite moment in the Odyssey. Emily Wilson, in her very fun LRB review, describes it like this: “One of Odysseus’ funniest (and most famous) tricks in Homer is to tell Polyphemus that his name is ‘No Man’. When the blinded giant screams for help from his neighbours, the other Cyclopes are reassured to learn that ‘No Man’ is hurting him.”

Something else that is shifting is this newsletter post, which is about neither a single poem or the Odyssey. Rather, it’s about the Sealey Challenge. Every August a bunch of people, braver and more nimble-witted than even Odysseus, challenge themselves to read a new poetry collection every day in August. If you participate in the Sealey Challenge, if you want to participate in the Sealey Challenge, if you don’t want to participate in the Sealey Challenge but would still like to read some poetry, we have some deals for you: Use the code SEALEY at checkout for $5 off. If you’re buying an ebook, that will make it free. You’re able to reuse the code, so if you want to put in five separate orders you can end up with five ebooks for $0. If you order print copies you’ll get $5 off and we’ll also send a few poetry microchaps, which could also count toward your Sealey Challenge. Here’s our selection of poetry titles:

Hair Shirt by Adrian Sobol (paperback / ebook)

The Life of the Party Is Harder to Find Until You’re the Last One Around by Adrian Sobol (paperback / ebook)

Your Favorite Poet by Leigh Chadwick (paperback / ebook)

Sophomore Slump by Leigh Chadwick (ebook)

Thumbsucker by Kat Giordano (paperback / ebook)

My Ardent Love for the Pencil by Vi Khi Nao (paperback / ebook)

You could also get five of these titles (we don’t have print copies of Sophomore Slump at the moment) and a tote bag, and five zines, for $50 with the bag of books bundle if you put POETRY as your favorite book in the survey at checkout. Use code POSTOFFICE to get free shipping. We just have four or five totes left so this particular bundle, I hope, won’t be available for much longer.

I opened with a poem. Let’s close with a poem. This is one of my favorites from Kat Giordano’s collection Thumbsucker. It’s called “Submission Guidelines.”

Submission Guidelines
by Kat Giordano

we are a journal of fiction and poetry.

we are a journal of words.

we are a journal of transgressive, gritty, outsider lit.

we have a name like [Cardinal direction] [U.S. state] Review.

we have a name like Gossamer or TOILET STAIN.

we have a name that uses special unicode characters i am too lazy to type here.

the name of our journal is your favorite color, followed by the name of the street you grew up on, followed by the name of your first grade pet.

the name of our journal is the first three digits of your social security number, followed by the next two digits of your social security number, followed by the final four digits of your social security number (please tell us the name of our journal).

we want your best work.

we want good fiction and good poetry.

we want your heart, your soul, the story only you can tell.

we want words that shock us and confuse us and make us laugh.

we want words that make us feel like shit.

we want words that tell us they love us and then damage us over time through a slow backslide into emotional unavailability that leaves us wondering what we did wrong.

we don't feel interested in words or writing or much of anything anymore, and we want the memory of how that passion felt.

we want you so bad, oh baby, oh baby.

we want your morning breath, your secret car-farts, whatever's growing in the mug you left sitting on your desk.

we want your lunch money. we want your car. we want your girlfriend.

we want the velvety skin on the inside of your wrist.

we want your filmy membranes, your nose drippings and popsicle stains.

we want anything that could be described with the words "fetid" and/or "residue."

we want warm root beer in a glass.

we want a little pomeranian wearing a hat.

we want you to delete that recording of us drunkenly hyperventilating into the toilet at applebee's.

we want you to delete our nudes and our number.

we want pizza.

we want a small harem of hot emo boys to take turns passionately validating our feelings while they massage our neck.

we want our cat to stop sticking his face in our food.

we want an ass tattoo but know deep down it's not actually going to happen.

we want a snack but there's not really anything good in the house so we just keep opening the fridge over and over until we're desperate enough to eat something less thrilling, like a pickle or a slice of cheese.

we want something we cannot articulate and don't know where to find, and we will spend the rest of our lives mauling the people we love in vain trying to claw it out of them. our time on this earth will be marked by a pattern of fleeting, almost manic highs at the prospect of finally filling the swirling chasm inside of us, followed by crushing and prolonged lows at the recurring realization that such a space can never be filled, we will try everything from drugs to sex to angry rampages to asceticism and punishing solitude and continue to come up empty. then, we will meet someone. that someone will remind us of something we'd forgotten. that person will bring us yellow light that we mistake for fulfillment or god. this person will insist on staying, will rebuff any and all fears until we almost trust their permanence. then, one day, we will be lying in bed beside this person and feel heaviness, the imminent ending, and be crushed at how familiar it seems. the next day, they will wake us up before work and kiss our forehead and something about the way they slide out of the bedroom will catch on one of the loose loops closing our heart, send the whole thing exploding open. in the fallout, we'll feel around for that yellow light from before. we'll know it existed, but only like an idea or black-and-white sentence. we won't be able to remember it.