Quote for the Day: September 16th, 2021

People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.

There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.

The Color Purple is one of my favorite books of all time. Because there are so many books I want to read, there are only a few books I’ll reread; The Color Purple is one of them. I get more from it each time I read it. More than just a great novel, it is a blueprint for expressing love through careful attention, through putting oneself in a place of openness and willingness to accept the love we feel we don’t deserve. There’s a lot of pain, yes, but there’s also so much joy. The Color Purple is so radiant it practically glows in the dark.

Thanks as always for being a faithful reader of The Voracious Bibliophile. If you like what you see, please like, comment, follow, and subscribe to my email list to get notified of new posts as soon as they drop. You can also email me at fred.slusher@thevoraciousbibliophile.com or catch me on Twitter and Instagram @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 15th, 2021

Someone Somewhere is Googling “Stonewall,” Inauguration Day 2013 by Stephen S. Mills

A screen is filling with black and white images:
police officers, drag queens, and a few actual 
stone walls. There are links to history pages, 
organizations that have taken the name,
and the website for the bar where it all began. 
A bar that now makes its money off of tourists 
paying homage to the riots, raising a gin 
and tonic to a movement that’s still not over,
but has changed direction. Today, people talk 
of marriage. Of becoming like everyone else. 
It’s cold outside and inside our Harlem 
apartment. A place that knows something 
about fighting, about surviving, about deciding 
how to be equal. Here on this day our computer 
screen is filled with a president taking a second 
term. A president we’ve fought to keep. 
A president willing to acknowledge our fight. 
We’ve learned to adapt, you and I. To find 
our own meaning. Our own way into love, 
sex, happiness. In the coming years, we’ll make 
choices, and yes, one day, we’ll probably be
legally tied to each other. Protected under 
the law. Written down in the history books. 
Two men. Two names. Two bodies. 
But that act, no matter how simple or elegant,
will never capture our lives, or our history,
or our desire to be undefined.

© 2013 Stephen S. Mills. Someone Somewhere is Googling “Stonewall,” Inauguration Day 2013 first appeared in the Summer 2013 issue of Referential Magazine. Stephen S. Mills is the author of He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices, which won the 2012 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry; A History of the Unmarried, which in 2015 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List; and Not Everything Thrown Starts a Revolution, which in 2019 was named to the American Library Association’s Over the Rainbow List. You can read more about Stephen and his work at his website.

Quote for the Day: September 15th, 2021

I hope you do more than just survive. I hope you act boldly without apologizing for who you are or the things you love. I hope you make art and listen to songs that make you sing out loud. I hope you discover new places and hidden coffee shops. I hope you fall in love with stories and dance in snowflakes and raindrops. I hope you achieve all your dreams and find the courage to love yourself. I hope you live.
Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts III

Poem for the Day: September 14th, 2021

Note Home by Chloe Honum

Mother, you have never seen such snow, such emphasis on 
setting. So it is accurate to say my heart broke in the snow. 
One patient here is a Vietnam vet. His torso is hard like an 
old-fashioned suitcase. Kick my dog, he says, referring to his 
beloved animal over ten years dead, and I’ll kick your ass. The 
light is fluorescent. Everything hums. It is so important to go
on naming, even if all I said to you this winter was snow, snow,
snow.

Then Winter: Poems by Chloe Honum is available to order from Bull City Press.

Update

I had trouble getting today’s poem to format the way the author originally intended, so for clarity’s sake and to preserve the integrity of the line breaks, I am including an image of the poem taken by @ChelsDingman on Twitter, to whom I am indebted. Thank you, Chelsea!

Quote for the Day: September 14th, 2021

Is the world such an evil place, that love should be indistinguishable from the basest and most abusive forms of violence? Outside her breath rises in a fine mist and the snow keeps falling, like a ceaseless repetition of the same infinitesimally small mistake.
Sally Rooney, Normal People: A Novel

Almost to 3K!!!

I am so overwhelmed with the way this blog has been received. Being able to share my work with the world and talk about books on a platform where I have the final say is a privilege I’ll never take for granted. Thank you so very much!

Poem for the Day: September 13th, 2021

Katrina by Patricia Smith

Weather is nothing until it reaches skin,
freezes dust, spits its little swords.
Kept to oceans, feeding only on salted water,
I was a rudderless woman in full tantrum,
throwing my body against worlds I wanted.
I never saw harm in lending that aches.
All I ever wanted to be
was a wet, gorgeous mistake,
a reason to crave shelter.

Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest.

I love the way Patricia Smith uses the imagery of a hurricane as a metaphor for the ways in which she herself has embodied fury, longing, and destruction. I’ve never read any of her work that wasn’t breathtaking and even that seems too cheap a word to describe the effect her poetry has on me. Her words are alchemical, an accelerant to the fire already burning inside my chest. If you’ve not yet read any of her collections, today is the perfect day to start.

From the Gram

I can’t remember if I mentioned this yet or not, but I created a special Instagram page to post complementary content for this blog. I really enjoy doing amateur graphic design work so being able to churn out simple, sleek, and stylish graphics with relative ease is a definite mood booster. I probably won’t cross-post everything I put on there because I want it to be complementary, not identical, but I couldn’t help but share the one below. Enjoy.

Quote for the Day: September 13th, 2021

Where do these stories come from? They emanate from Louise, in a continual flood, without her even thinking about it, without her making the slightest effort of memory or imagination. But in what black lake, in what deep forest has she found these cruel tales where the heroes die at the end, after first saving the world?
Leïla Slimani, The Perfect Nanny: A Novel

Poem for the Day: September 12th, 2021

Of The Empire by Mary Oliver

We will be known as a culture that feared death 
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity 
for the few and cared little for the penury of the 
many. We will be known as a culture that taught 
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke 
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a 
commodity. And they will say that this structure 
was held together politically, which it was, and 
they will say also that our politics was no more 
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of 
the heart, and that the heart, in those days, 
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

No one saw the world as clearly as did Mary Oliver, and no one loved it as fiercely as she did. She would hate what we’re continuing to do to our planet and to each other. What is wrong with a world in which people care more about lining their pockets with more money than they’ll ever need than they do about their fellow humans who are poor and hungry? What beats strangely in our hearts, that makes them so small, and hard, and full of meanness?

I think blind optimism is worse than cruel indifference. It sustains objections to the worst forms of suffering with a simpleton’s simper and the decontextualized murmurings of a seasoned gaslighter.

I won’t pretend to know the answers to these questions. I think blind optimism is worse than cruel indifference. It sustains objections to the worst forms of suffering with a simpleton’s simper and the decontextualized murmurings of a seasoned gaslighter. We are not without hope, but that hope must be doused with passion, and seasoned with care.