The Sealey Challenge is ongoing; I have not and will not commit to the whole thing unless I make drastic changes to my lifestyle (which spiritually logistically and physiologically requires me to be on a bicycle, by a body of water, and/or in the woods at least several hours a week each August). However, it’s always a good time of year to read more poems, so I’m trying to get through a book a week, focusing on ones I already own and haven’t read yet. I thought I’d write a sentence or two about some of my poetry reads of the summer so far:

• Lilacs by Rainer Diana Hamilton asks the question: what if a poem were a lilac and a lilac were a poem, and how can one recover a lost sense of smell? They initially called this style of poem a “trance essay” (here’s their Trance Essay for Remembering Images which became Images Lilac in the book): an endeavor in writing with deep focus to bring about a sense memory. How senses present themselves in the physical body is fascinating to me, and this book also has one of the great pieces I’ve ever read on “taste” as the metaphorical sense for “what you like.” Plus I think it’s the only book I’ve ever read to describe, in the context of reporting on a daily soundscape, the great mobile smartphone application Merlin aka Bird Shazam. Recommended! (The app and the book.)

• Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove was recommended to me by the poet Meredith Nnoka when I was telling her about working on a sequence of narrative poems that deal with queerness and an ambiguous sense of loss. I went straight to the library and pretty much devoured this book; it’s elegiac and complicated and every line is precisely wrought. Here’s the poem from it that stuck with me the most for how it stops time in a moment of imaginative escape.

• Against Heaven by Kemi Alabi is absolutely kicking my ass presently: it uses form, repetition, and the shape of text on the page to present facets of Blackness in diaspora and to interrogate ideas of God and control. There’s a pantoum set in H&M that I keep thinking about. The way they use sound and diction is dazzling; I already think I’ll be rereading this collection.

Now that I’ve bullet-pointed out my recent reading and left you with some cool links, let me also mention that I’ll be reading my forthcoming zine at next week’s Tuesday Funk! It’s called Salad Days Online. It’s about Online and what is good there. Hope to see you there and/or in my email inbox, chatting about things to read.

Yours in summer sweetness,

Erin