Poem for the Day: September 24th, 2021

*White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems 1946-2006* by Donald Hall

Affirmation by Donald Hall

Let us stifle under mud at the pond’s edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

Donald Hall (1928-2018) was considered one of the preeminent writers of his generation. He authored more than fifty books across several genres but he is most well known for his poetry. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2010, which is the highest honor the United States government bestows upon artists and arts patrons.

White Apples and the Taste of Stone: Selected Poems, 1946-2006, the collection from which today’s poem is taken, was published in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and is now available to purchase wherever books are sold.

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, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 23rd, 2021

*My Village: Selected Poems 1972-2014* by Wu Sheng and John Balcom (Translator)

American Citizenship by Wu Sheng and John Balcom (Translator)

Out here in the sticks
You rarely encounter such genius:
"Come, come, come to Taiwan U
Go, go, go to the US"
Words passed with envy from mouth to mouth
Giving the hometown high hopes

Then I heard you've become an American citizen
You're very busy
With house payments
Credit cards
You rarely have time to write home
You must know unspeakable hardship
At home, mother
Is busy as always
Covering our tuition
Doing never-ending farm work
                season after season
For you to study abroad and
Leave the family in debt

You ought to remember
                at the end of the year you left
Father, who struggled all his life
In wind and rain, in sorching sun and bitter cold
Died in a car accident
Leaving all life's difficulties
To mother, who can't even read
For more than ten years,
                From morning till night
Our illiterate mother
Has had so much
She wanted me to write and tell you
—how she worried about you

And I ought to tell you
Every time there's a wedding in the village
Mother insists
I write your name
In the register
Because you are the eldest son
Our older brother

You left your backward hometown
More than ten years ago
To become an American citizen
In every airmail letter home
You express your disappointment and anger
At your unsuccessful brothers and sisters

Yes, we've all disappointed you
You're ashamed of us
Like this small plot of land
This stupid plot of land
Which provides you no sense of pride or glory
Because we are unwilling to study
Those proud ABCs
We're only willing to work, struggle and sweat in silence
In our homeland
I heard you've become an American citizen
You're very busy
You must have suffered great hardship
I don't know if you miss mother
                The way she misses you
She's growing older thinking about you
Do you ever think about
The potatoes we ate as kids?
They were cheap and tasty
I don't know why
You are so busy in that foreign land
And for whom

1978

My Village: Selected Poems 1972-2014 was released in 2020 by Zephyr Press and is now available to order wherever books are sold.

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.

All Aboard the ARC: Feel Your Way Through: A Book of Poetry by Kelsea Ballerini

***Note: I received a free digital review copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.***

Kelsea Ballerini is the third singer-celebrity in recent memory to release a poetry collection. Following Lana Del Rey’s Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass and Halsey’s I Would Leave Me If I Could, Ballerini’s Feel Your Way Through is as much a memoir as it is a collection of poetry. It is also delightfully unpretentious and genuine in a way one wouldn’t necessarily expect from an artist who has achieved such success at such a young age.

Poignant, haunting, and yet never overly melancholy, Feel Your Way Through leads the reader on a journey with Ballerini chronicling her life up until now, with all of its fierce loves, heartbreaks, hard knocks, and triumphs. The title itself is revealing and may carry multiple meanings for both readers and Ballerini herself. Feeling one’s way through could refer to moving along a path which you can’t see clearly, so you have to rely on your gut and your instincts to keep from stumbling. It also could be taken more literally, urging readers to lead with their hearts even when it hurts.

Written with a seasoned songwriter’s ear for rhythm, this deeply heartfelt and startlingly intimate collection is sure to delight long-time Ballerini fans as well as people who haven’t listened to her music.

Written with a seasoned songwriter’s ear for rhythm, this deeply heartfelt and startlingly intimate collection is sure to delight long-time Ballerini fans as well as people who haven’t listened to her music. I can confidently say that this is a book I’ll be eagerly putting in the hands of my customers.

Feel Your Way Through: A Book of Poetry is due to be released on November 16th, 2021 by Ballantine Books and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: September 23rd, 2021

*Normal People: A Novel* by Sally Rooney

Life is the thing you bring with you inside your own head.

I think part of Sally Rooney’s magic is that she sometimes expresses the most profound truths about the human experience in the simplest language, in a way that makes you want to close the book, look up at the wall, and mouth wow over and over again. Her sentences are more prayers than anything else.

Poem for the Day: September 22nd, 2021

[The house was just twinkling in the moon light] by Gertrude Stein

The house was just twinkling in the moon light,   
And inside it twinkling with delight,
Is my baby bright.
Twinkling with delight in the house twinkling   
with the moonlight,
Bless my baby bless my baby bright,
Bless my baby twinkling with delight,
In the house twinkling in the moon light,
Her hubby dear loves to cheer when he thinks
and he always thinks when he knows and he always   
knows that his blessed baby wifey is all here and he
is all hers, and sticks to her like burrs, blessed baby

Today’s poem is taken from Baby Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas which was published by St. Martin’s Press in 1999. It is available to order wherever books are sold.

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.

Quote for the Day: September 22nd, 2021

Elegance is achieved when everything superfluous has been discarded, and the archer discovers simplicity and concentration; the simpler and more sober the posture, the more beautiful. The snow is lovely because it has only one color, the sea is lovely because it appears to be a completely flat surface, but both sea and snow are deep and know their own qualities.

The Archer was published in 2020 by Knopf Publishing Group and is available to order wherever books are sold.

5 Books That Changed My Life

Link to original video posted on TikTok:
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMRbeke5d/

I’ve been revamping my socials to all have matching handles and this is my second attempt at #BookTok. The first one got a little bit of traction but I think I know what I’m doing a little bit better this time around. To accompany the video, though, I’m going to give you, my blog readers, a little something extra: a gallery of the book covers of the books featured in my #BookTok *and* a blog-exclusive quote graphic from each book that I won’t be posting anywhere else.

*The Voracious Bibliophile’s* 5 Books That Changed My Life

“I don’t want to lose the boy with the bread.” – Suzanne Collins, *The Hunger Games*

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it. People think pleasing God is all God cares about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.” – Alice Walker, *The Color Purple*

“To convey in any existing language how I miss you isn’t possible. It would be like blue trying to describe the ocean.” – Mary-Louise Parker, *Dear Mr. You*

“How wild it was, to let it be.” – Cheryl Strayed, *Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail*

“The moon sets and the eastern sky lightens, the hem of night pulling away, taking stars with it one by one until only two are left.” – Anthony Doerr, *All the Light We Cannot See*

A Small Reminder for You Today…

Alt Text: Reminder: You only get one shot at life. Do not waste your time or energy on people or things that don’t nourish your soul, invigorate your mind, and bring you happiness.

Poem for the Day: September 21st, 2021

*Somewhere Else: Poems* by Matthew Shenoda

Relics by Matthew Shenoda

Scrabbling bones together like a gathering of river stones

Bones become sacred
Human remains, memories of cartilage
Piled centuries high
Skulls and leg remnants begin to tell the stories of before.

I am the once-severed arm of a young girl
Scrambling for a foothold in this desert
Where once my enemy chased did not live

I am the fingers of a woman whose knuckles live beneath a flower box

We remember each other through these bones
Through the songs of calcium deficiency and famine strings that strum us into night
We are the gathering of old-timers whose eye sockets tell stories of victory

We are a memory shaped by vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time

I am the keeper of a man whose only hope was grounding toil
Scrubbing my skin with the earth for food

I am the elbow of children whose eyes switched at the thought of cold

I am the shin of garbage collectors building stamina for a city to come

We are a memory shaped by vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time
We are the dissipating by the skeletons of time
We are the dissipating cartilage of our great-grandchildren's memory holding to their sockets by a sinew of hope

Making sense of these bones we reassemble history
Making ancestral tapestries in the shape of retaining walls

We are a memory shaped by a vertebrae
Clappers of rhythm disassembled by the skeletons of time

You are the skin behind the clouds

Matthew Shenoda currently teaches at San Francisco State University and works as an activist in the Bay Area. Somewhere Else: Poems was released in 2005 by Coffee House Press and is available to order on their website.

Quote for the Day: September 21st, 2021

Big parts of us got broken, parts of our hearts, minds, and beings. Yet we keep getting up, lurching on. We dance with a limp.
Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

Resilience isn’t Annie telling you the sun will come out tomorrow; it’s Annie telling you it might not and helping you up anyway.

I love Anne Lamott. She’s like your childhood pastor if your childhood pastor was super-cool and swore sometimes. A large part of her oeuvre, at least what I’ve read, is focused on resilience. Almost everyone has heard of resilience but few people can actually tell you what it is. It is not Live, Laugh, Loving your way through life like a mindless simpleton. Resilience isn’t Annie telling you the sun will come out tomorrow; it’s Annie telling you it might not and helping you up anyway.