I’ve had less free time for reading lately. Last month, I took over as managing editor for the Schooner, and since then I’ve been consumed by getting up to speed with the job (when I’m not spinning out over the latest attacks on education, women, and queer and trans people, that is). Here are a few things, though, that I’ve managed to pick up and finish in the last few months:
Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima: This was my first time reading this collection, and it definitely won’t be my last. I keep returning to the first lines in “Revolutionary Letter #1”: “I have just realized that the stakes are myself / I have no other / ransom money, nothing to break or barter but my life”
Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet by Nikki Giovanni: I picked up a small mass market paperback of this years ago, and finally got around to reading it last month. Here’s a a bit from Giovanni’s essay “On Being Asked What It’s Like to Be Black”:
I was trained intellectually and spiritually to respect myself and the people who respected me. I was emotionally trained to love those who love me. If such a thing can be, I was trained to be in power—that is, to learn and act upon necessary emotions which will grant me more control over my life. Sometimes it’s a painful thing to make decisions based on our training, but if we are properly trained we do. I consider this a good. My life is not all it will be. There is a real possibility that I can be the first person in my family to be free. That would make me happy. I’m twenty-five years old. A revolutionary poet. I love.
Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg: I’ve been meaning to read this for too long (okay, this seems to be a theme with this list). It’s by no means an easy read, and yet once I started, I couldn’t put it down. Jess, the main character and first-person narrator, feels so stunningly real—a character who I immediately cared about, who I carried with me for days after I’d finished the last page. Here is Jess after losing a job following a unionization effort: “I went to the window and looked out over the mounds of snow, wishing I could do everything in my life once as practice and then go back and do it again.” You can read a free PDF here. An at-cost print edition is available here.
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje: Yet another book that has been on my reading list for too long. The prose reads like poetry, the narrative slipping between memory and present day as it moves between the four main characters. I had seen the movie in my teens, and enjoyed it; the book, though, is far richer and more complex. I found it telling that in the film version, the most significant omission is the scene in which Kip learns that the U.S. has bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. British colonialism and racism are central concerns in the novel; the film, in contrast, is given the Hollywood treatment, stripping much of the political critique and leaning more heavily on the romantic story lines.
After Image by Jenny George: George’s The Dream of Reason is a collection I return to often, so I was thrilled to dig into her newest book. The same sharp, glimmering poignancy that I find in her earlier poems is on display here as well, in poems that revolve around life, death, and grief. From the poem “Vivarium”: “Of course an amateur is simply a person / who loves, who brings love to bear / on a particular subject.”
Bonus read: I was delighted and very grateful to read this beautiful, thoughtful review of Red Ocher by Grace Johnson for Colorado State University’s Center for Literary Publishing. Johnson writes: “Perhaps ultimately, Poli’s collection illustrates how a collapse can lead to an expansion, leading not to an expansion of knowing, but of the true beauty of not knowing.”