Happy Poetry Month
which coincides nicely with this National Hair Shirt Day
It’s Poetry Month. You need to read more poetry. My New Year’s resolution was to read more poetry and it’s really nice. Obviously I would like it if you start with Hair Shirt, the newest collection from Adrian Sobol and the best poetry book of 2025, in my opinion. (If you don’t like to order books from small presses, given that the orders are sometimes filled at a glacial pace—I think we’re in the middle, personally, not always the fastest, for sure, but decent overall, most of the time, you can go pick one up at Powell’s in a couple days.) But really any poetry is good. Yesterday, in my resource class, we read “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver. We didn’t have time to finish our discussion so today we’re going to read it again and keep talking about it. And I’m going to message my resource English counterpart and say it’s Poetry Month, let’s read poems every day this week.
I would love for folks to buy some of our poetry books this month, because that’s how we stay afloat, but also in honor of reading more poetry, the ebooks/PDFs of all our poetry titles are free to download this month with code POETRY.
Our poetry titles:
Adrian Sobol portrait with new moon The Moon demands to be taken seriously. Me too. So I write a letter, address it, lick the envelope shut. Dear Moon, come back, we have so much in common. Let’s hang out sometime. I haven’t worn my floral dress since that summer in the commune, salting my body with sage to cleanse the houses inside me. The ghosts just won’t leave. They harbor. They feast. They say the sky is indifferent without you. Stars go quiet one by one like distant ships. If I were a constellation I’d have burned out in front of everyone too. They’d call me Argos after Odysseus’ dog who waited to die until his master could watch. Hey, Moon I don’t believe in astrology. I still know exactly who I am. I forgive myself for it once a day. Moon, please I just want to be seen as anybody else. That summer, when I saw my portrait for the first time, I was touched. It looked nothing like me. I said Thank you. It looks nothing like me.