Quote for the Day: December 24th, 2021

One person alone is not a full person: we exist in relation to others.
Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

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Quote for the Day: December 23rd, 2021

*Call Me by Your Name: A Novel* by André Aciman

Most of us can’t help but live as if we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between.
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name: A Novel

Quote for the Day: December 19th, 2021

*Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America* (Audiobook) by Ijeoma Oluo

Now, as we reach the apex of hyper-capitalism that makes it harder and harder for white men to hold out hope that all they’ve been promised will actually be theirs, we see their desperation lead to terrorism, self-harm, and the catastrophic destruction of our environment. How many more mass shootings will we be able to endure? How many more economic recessions? How much more climate crisis? How many more wars? How many more pandemics? How many more people can live in poverty? How many more of us can go without healthcare? How many more can be locked away in prisons? I don’t think we can withstand much more. I don’t think we are withstanding what is happening right now. We are coming apart as we grow increasingly polarized and as our power structures work to further insulate themselves from any responsibility to the people they claim to serve. We are running out of time to fix this. I have to believe that it’s not too late and I hope you believe that too because we have so much to do.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

Quote for the Day: December 18th, 2021

We must ask ourselves what we are willing to give up in order to be free.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

Quote for the Day: December 17th, 2021

There is a segment of the white American population that has always viewed Black dissent as a threat to white safety and security. Since the election of Obama and the increase in protests around the country over the killing of unarmed Black people by police, white anxiety over Black empowerment had increased to a level that many of us had not seen in our lifetimes. Trump gave his angry crowds a prime target against which to vent their fury and anxiety by painting Black Americans as simply ungrateful for the opportunities they had been granted.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

All Aboard the ARC: New Names for Lost Things by Noor Unnahar

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

A poet’s heart is a populous grave. Bodies turned stories turned / guilt turned into a mouth. I am trying to be lonely again.
Noor Unnahar, [A Poet’s Heart]

In New Names for Lost Things, Noor Unnahar’s newest collection of poetry and visual art, she speaks in her own inimitable voice about the achingly familiar: love, loss, grief, death, memory, and forgetting. She writes with emotional clarity in an economy of language that doesn’t waste words. This collection is exactly what it needs to be, nothing more and nothing less, and that is the highest compliment one can pay a poet.

…she [Unnahar] speaks…about the achingly familiar: love, loss, grief, death, memory, and forgetting.

Major themes recurring throughout New Names for Lost Things include family memory, the opportunity cost of our chosen versus our lost or unchosen futures, and the way(s) in which what we choose to keep, both material and immaterial, come to define us not only to ourselves but to the rest of the world. While Unnahar’s first collection, yesterday i was the moon, was luminous in its own right, New Names for Lost Things is in a category entirely its own. Put simply, if yesterday i was the moon were a single star, New Names for Lost Things is its own galaxy. This is one of the best collections I’ve read this year and I want everyone I know to read it.

New Names for Lost Things was published by Andrews McMeel Publishing on October 19th, 2021 and is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: December 16th, 2021

*The Creature of Habit* by Jennifer E. Smith (Words) and Leo Espinosa (Pictures)

The very big creature had never been out at this hour before. Everything looked different. The sky was full of color, and the sun—as round as an orange—was disappearing into the water. He knew this wasn’t where he was supposed to be right now. But as the world turned from pink to orange to purple all around him, he wondered if maybe it actually was.
Jennifer E. Smith, The Creature of Habit

Quote for the Day: December 15th, 2021

Black women who make history are often written out of it.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

I especially love this chapter in Ijeoma Oluo’s book because she talks about one of American history’s oft-neglected public servants, Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005). She was the first Black woman elected to the United States House of Representatives, serving New York’s 12th congressional district from 1969 to 1983. She was also the first Black American to run for President of the United States. She sought the Democratic Party’s nomination for the 1972 presidential election and while she did not get the nomination, she changed the landscape of American politics forever.

Hers was a grassroots activism centering the interests and issues of all Americans, especially those occupying marginalized identities and living in communities disenfranchised by the white male elite. She was able to bring together a broad coalition of people to fight toward a more just and perfect Union, the one idealized by the Founders who failed to see people who looked like Chisholm as fully-human.

Hers [Chisholm’s] was a grassroots activism centering the interests and issues of all Americans, especially those occupying marginalized identities and living in communities disenfranchised by the white male elite.

The legacy of Shirley Chisholm reverberates throughout American politics. She paved the way for other BIPOC women who wanted to run for public office by providing them with a framework showing it was possible. Yvonne Brathwaite. Barbara Jordan. Maxine Waters. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ayanna Pressley. Kamala Harris. Shirley Chisholm paved the way for all of them.

Quote for the Day: December 14th, 2021

It is not simply that many white Americans do not care, it is that many white Americans are so invested in the political exclusion of people who are not white men that they will actively work against any political change that would meaningfully enfranchise women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and disabled people, even when they are aware of the potential cost to their own well-being. Many have decided that the psychological benefit of looking at government and seeing a roomful of white men is worth the very real cost to their financial and physical welfare. Somehow, even though history has shown that it is not the case, many white Americans are still able to convince themselves that listening to the same people they’ve always listened to will pay off for them in the end.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America

Quote for the Day: December 13th, 2021

It is psychologically damaging to never see yourself reflected in positions of leadership in your own country. It limits our feeling of citizenship and it limits the possibilities we see for ourselves and our children. It creates a feeling of unsafety.
Ijeoma Oluo, Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America