Quote for the Day: November 24th, 2021

Stop asking people for directions to places they’ve never been.
Glennon Doyle

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: November 23rd, 2021

Self-Compassion by James Crews

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too 
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, but today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the threat of more wildfires,
the possible collapse of the Gulf Stream,
then remembered that in a few more minutes, 
I’d have to climb down to the cellar and empty
the bucket I placed beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.

© 2021 James Crews. “Self-Compassion” was originally published by the Academy of American Poets for their Poem-a-Day series on November 17th, 2021. Crews is the editor of the forthcoming collection The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy, which is due to be released in April 2022 by Storey Publishing and is now available to preorder wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: November 23rd, 2021

*Enemies With Benefits: A Loveless Brothers Novel* by Roxie Noir

You’re walking barefoot along main street at midnight with no shoes on like some redneck hooker because your night’s going well?
Enemies With Benefits: A Loveless Brothers Novel by Roxie Noir

Everyone who reads has a book they keep with them for long waits in the grocery store line or to flip through while sitting in the doctor’s office. I’m talking ratty paperbacks and ebooks read on smartphones, those books some call “guilty pleasures”. I don’t really like that term because anything that brings someone joy, as long as it’s not harming them or anyone else, should not have even a modicum of guilt assigned to it.

Enemies With Benefits is that book for me right now. I don’t ever read it for long stretches of time, just when I have a minute here or there. It doesn’t take up a lot of space in my brain but it does bring me a lot of joy when I get to read three or four pages at a time every few days.

Are you reading anything at the moment that’s bringing you a lot of joy? Let me know in the comments.

Poem for the Day: November 22nd, 2021

Wight by Stanley Plumly

In the dark we disappear, pure being.
Our mirror images, impure being.

Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and
nothingness (Sartre)—which is purer being?

Being alone is no way to be: thus
loneliness is the test of pure being.

Nights in love I fell too far or not quite
far enough—one pure, one impure being.

Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water,
smoke from fire—a metaphor's pure being.

Stillness and more stillness and the light locked
deep inside—both pure and impure being.

Is is the verb of being, I the noun—
or pronoun for the purists of being.

I was, I am, I looked within and saw
nothing very clearly: purest being.

Stanley Plumly (1939-2019) was greatly influenced by his working-class background, a fact which is evident in his work. He earned his B.A. at Wilmington College in Ohio and his Ph.D. at Ohio University. During his long career, he taught at the University of Iowa, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the University of Maryland. He also served as the poet laureate of Maryland for several years. You can read more about his life and work here.

Quote for the Day: November 22nd, 2021

Xavier Dolan as Maxime (left) and Gabriel D’Almeida Freitas as Matthias (right) in a scene from *Matthias & Maxime* (2019); directed by Xavier Dolan

Sometimes, you spend your life doing one thing, and in the end, it wasn’t your thing.
Matthias & Maxime (2019); directed by Xavier Dolan

Is this primarily a book blog? Yes. Have I been posting a lot of quotes from films? Also yes. Well, this is my blog, and I’ll post whatever I want whenever I want for as long as I want. I am also of the opinion that film, as much as literature, is text. Don’t take my word for it, though—Thomas C. Foster’s Reading the Silver Screen: A Film Lover’s Guide to Decoding the Art Form That Moves is the perfect place to start for any would-be cinephile or for that matter, anyone who appreciates the movies and wants to learn more about them.

There are hints of Bergman, of course. Some Truffaut and Fellini. Van Sant is flickering always in the background. But there’s something else there too, something which belongs wholly and exclusively to Dolan.

I love Xavier Dolan. Some of you may remember my review of his film J’ai tué ma mère (I Killed My Mother) (2009), which I called a “semi-autobiographical, near-perfect evocation of the vagaries of queer adolescence”. You can tell that the young auteur is well-read when it comes to great films from the way he sets up his mises en scène to the way he is able to harness every drop of emotional resonance in each frame. There are hints of Bergman, of course. Some Truffaut and Fellini. Van Sant is flickering always in the background. But there’s something else there too, something which belongs wholly and exclusively to Dolan.

The fact that Dolan is only 32 years old means that we’re hopefully only seeing him at the depth of his powers. I only hope the planet holds out long enough for us to see him at his height.

Poem for the Day: November 21st, 2021

Winter Journal: Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils by Emily Wilson

stripped batting of cloud
glimpsed ligaments
dusk coming up under
lithographic, nib-hatchings
       instruments click
       the fine-sprung locust
       replicate dinge along hill-lines
       tailings of umber, the rust smudge
There is still that hemmed ocean of oaks
       the various reds, the somehow
       silver cast over the brown-gold
       the under-brushed shadows
How can there be more of their dispensing
       into air?
The night-openings of the trees
The thousand clefts into
Their corridors shiver and merge and piece apart
There is no one beside what was once river
Only the carbons incoming
       accreting in leaves
Love of old oaks unencumbering
Root-beauties brought through
crude sieves of bare trees
the few fastened leaves
Those pods are like tongues or like sickles
The blades have been pulled from their sheaths
The backs of the clouds now upturned
They herd from pink seas
They make their untouchable stream
       through regions of steep emptiness
       against which the trees have their gestures
Drop down, drop down toward me
your little sleek scars
Make your bed in rough cedars
clangor of darks numbering in
clusters of trunks and spoked lungs
the thistles that work at the gums

© 2001 Emily Wilson and Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. “Winter Journal: Threshed Blue, Cardings, Dim Tonsils” originally appeared in Wilson’s collection The Keep, which was published in 2001 by University of Iowa Press.

Emily Wilson studied at Harvard University and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at the latter, as well as at Colby College, Grinnell College, and the University of Montana. Wilson is the author of four poetry collections: The Keep (University of Iowa Press, 2001); Morpho Terrestre (2006), a limited edition book featuring artwork by Sara Langworthy; Micrographia (University of Iowa Press, 2010); and The Great Medieval Yellows (Canarium Books, 2015).

Writing for Boston Review, James Galvin said of Wilson: “Generous in her spareness, clear in her complexity, matching wildness of diction with precision of sense, nervousness with nerve, her poems are not written for analysis, perhaps not even for approval. As we watch poetical heresies turn into orthodoxies, it becomes clear, especially in a poet like Wilson, that only originality, a signature style, remains steadfastly heretical.”

Quote for the Day: November 21st, 2021

*Sound of Metal* (2019); directed by Darius Marder

…so disconcerting the things that your memory holds onto without you knowing.
Sound of Metal (2019); directed by Darius Marder

Poem for the Day: November 20th, 2021

Chorus Attempting to Interpret Unearthed Fragments of Their Play by Carolina Ebeid

Can you let go the concern
for how it began      what happened

Here the word house remains
A reddening (      ) near house

To describe the sounds
coming in      A human voice
barks through the window

the same voice      like horsehair
stretched along the bow drawn
across the strings

Where the action is missing
we place (      ) A girl pours out

water from a pail flung up
so that the water      arches
into a sickle in an instant
of daylight

The word swallows      as a complaint
of swallows raiding the air
suddenly thick with gnats

When you notice the ash
you will mutter ash
& it will appear again: ash
on everything, behind the ears ash

Maybe this shadow belongs
to the house at 4:30
Shadow is a length of gauze
loosened over the garden

It began with blizzards
for nine hours

A cleft on the ceiling
or a cleft in the chest
No matter, a cleft let
the weather in

Here is a description
of a face in anger
a weather of arrows 

Instead of counting sheep
the injured man folds clothes
in his head into heaps

Separate what is missing
from what’s disappeared

(here has been eaten by silverfish)
We are left to think of (      )

as the space between falling
asleep & waking up
Swallow can be a passage

the gullet, throat,
a grave in the ground
We’re surrounded by swallows

that open (      ) so fluent with bodies
nobodies

Here there was a story
& we were part of the after-
waves in a disaster

braiding wreaths of roadside flowers

The violet ones we’ll call purple daughters
The white ones: asylum lights

Ebeid earned her MFA from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin and is pursuing her Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Denver. She currently lives in Colorado where she teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. She also serves as poetry editor at The Rumpus and edits (with her husband, Jeffrey Pethybridge) Visible Binary, an online journal specializing in experimental poetics and avant-garde expression. She has been published in numerous journals both in print and online and has been awarded multiple fellowships, among them fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

*You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior* by Carolina Ebeid

She is the author of the poetry collection You Ask Me To Talk About the Interior, which was published in 2016 by Noemi Press and is available to purchase through Small Press Distribution.

Quote for the Day: November 20th, 2021

But she never looked back with regret. There were so many ways for things to get better.
Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club: A Novel

Poem for the Day: November 19th, 2021

Nothing Gold Can Stay by Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Public domain. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” was originally published in October 1923 in The Yale Review. It was also included in Frost’s collection New Hampshire, which was published that same year by Henry Holt and for which Robert Frost won the 1924 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.