Quote for the Day: September 27th, 2021

If we want change, we must be agents of change.
Laila Lalami, Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America

Quote for the Day: September 26th, 2021

A man is a god in ruins.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Poem for the Day: September 26th, 2021

Altogether Elsewhere by Tess Taylor

They multiply, these cities of the heart,
these rooms we lodge our bodies in.

Brief beds: one California night
I swam between the humpbacked coastal ranges

and woke Scotch-tinged, wet, newly dreaming
to smokestacks and sharp dawn in Queens.

Light split the branches of fresh trees.
A stage-set life implied itself from props.

Now morning— pigeon flocks, construction sites,
a Western freeway's glint, a garden filled

with verbena, sage, my childhood light—
this midsummer, too, will go so soon.

O unfinishable homes: You each feel so real so briefly.
I feel you incomplete me, incompletely.

The Forage House by Tess Taylor was published in 2013 by Red Hen 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, Instagram, TikTok, and Pinterest @voraciousbiblog. Keep reading the world, one page (or pixel) at a time.

Poem for the Day: September 25th, 2021

Tongues by Justin Danzy

Becoming the raspberry stain on the pink of your cheek,
a tongue’s soft landing spot. Becoming the empty ritual,
what can’t be said. Becoming intercession, my language
becoming yours, the blessing of tongues. Becoming the river
in the belly, implanted language, dead boy’s song. Becoming dry
with manhood. Becoming the doors we’ve closed, those I’ve learned
to open with a tongue. Becoming seen in the body, witnessed, becoming
clarity, the fear of it. Becoming the name I’ve been given,
the honorific, a placeholder. Becoming postured
to my Father’s dilemma, the inherited tongue. Becoming
what I wish I could be on my own. Becoming kept,
becoming stolen, becoming made free to leave when I am not yet ready
to go. Becoming the might of what we serve, the oft-
invisibled. Becoming don’t look back, pillar of salt. Becoming idoled.
Becoming possessed. Becoming the body’s mettle, the tongue’s chisel.
Becoming compass. Becoming the help that I needed, my Father’s hidden
forgiveness. Becoming the secrets I hope to taste in you,
the wounded tongue, braided blood covenant. Becoming forbidden’s
starting point, a bold beginning, the flaying of what I do not yet know I believe.

“Tongues” appears in the September 2021 issue of Poetry, which is now available to buy from newsstands everywhere or to read on the Poetry Foundation’s website.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TikTok Discoveries: Confrontations – Single by Alex

I love discovering artists on social media and TikTok seems to be the best app out there right now for creatives to have a platform for showcasing their work. I was scrolling through TikTok this morning and ran across @songsbyalex and his new single, “Confrontations”. In it, he talks about the double lives queer people are made to live when they’re growing up. There are all these rules and codes you have to follow in order to fit into the larger heteronormative culture, because refusing to do so often leads to ostracism in the best-case scenarios and bullying/harassment/violence in the worst-case scenarios.

That’s really what “Confrontations” is all about—those first forays into learning and unlearning to find out who we really are when we can finally be free.

Even when you come out of the closet, you still have to do a lot of work figuring out who you really are. You’ve spent years, decades even, masking your true self behind behaviors that kept you (and your secret) safe from exposure. You don’t even know which parts of you are authentic and which you had to manufacture in order to make yourself palatable to the rest of the world. That’s really what “Confrontations” is all about—those first forays into learning and unlearning to find out who we really are when we can finally be free.

“Confrontations” is now available to stream wherever you get your music. Do yourself a favor and give Alex a listen.