Books I Can't Review and other updates
When I sent my March piece on What the Chickadee Knows, I had planned to send another piece in April or early May. However, two other projects came up instead. Both are now available online, so I'm writing today to share them in the spirit of Stanza Break's original goal, which I first conceived of as a newsletter called "Books I Can't Review." That would include books by my friends, books that were "too old," and other books I was somehow too close to. That name felt a little too glib, so I tightened up the concept and chose a better name. Both of the pieces linked below fall under one of the categories I'd initially considered: a book "too old" to write about in a traditional outlet (without it being a "scholarly" piece, which, gross), and a book by one of my friends.
The first piece is an essay called "On Selected Poems by Denise Levertov" which is up at a new project called, wait for it, Selected Poems. The book is just over twenty years old, much too old to review for a traditional outlet, but Joshua Edwards (poet and an editior of the terrific Canarium Books) started this outlet to feature "short essays about books of poetry." Other pieces focus on the selected poems of William Bronk, Tomaž Šalamun, and Emily Dickinson, among others. I was thrilled Josh let me write about Levertov's Selected, though I did go a little longer than I intended. The piece as published is about a thousand words shorter than my initial first draft. I cut out a longer meditation about my friends and the way books of poems are gifted and shared, even when they're out of print. I also cut out a section about one of my first poetry teachers, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, who deserves her own essay one of these days.
The second piece falls under the "books by my friends" category, though it isn't a review. My friend Chaun Webster's new book, Wail Song, was published at the beginning of April, so Chaun and I talked about his garden and his writing for Full Stop. I reviewed Chaun's first book, GeNtry!fication, or the scene of the crime when it was published in 2018 and we've since become friends, so I couldn't review Wail Song, but I'm going to bang the drum for Chaun's work until he's recognized the way he should be. Chaun is in a lineage with writers like Nathaniel Mackey, Fred Moten, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Dionne Brand, and Christina Sharpe (most of whom came up in our conversation). I hope you'll give our conversation a read.
I have more plans for Stanza Break coming up this summer, including another possible piece that fits in one of the "Books I Can't Review" categories, but also a small stack of books in translation that I'm excited to share as well. More soon.
I'm glad you're here. Stay weird.