hello!! i've been good, just... very, very busy. but when am i not? i hope you’ve been doing well too <3

hmmm poetry is always hard for me to rec bc i don’t think i have much discerning taste for it… i’m perhaps not the most poetically-minded person. i find myself thinking more in dense sentences/paragraphs and nested lists; i like arguments and footnotes and etymologies. which is a lovely subcategory of poetry in itself, one might argue, but. still. be forewarned.

first names to come to mind:
— sonnets by diane seuss (always always alwayyyyyys. i genuinely think about this collection at least once a week.)
— soft science by franny choi
— marie howe, who writes with this incredible quiet that somehow sneaks up on you
— mary ruefle, whose work have pushed me forward in many of my personal writing.
— hanif abdurraqib, whose poetry and essays both feel impossibly generous and attentive

and then a few more i've enjoyed off the top of my head:

— victoria chang (obit) — somewhere between poetry, memoir, and essay. it's one of those books where the form itself is carrying the grief. it’s been really interesting for me in the past year especially.
— monica youn (blackacre, from from) — she writes about identity, language, and the self in a way that feels incredibly thoughtful without ever becoming dry. a weakness of mine.
— solmaz sharif (look) — if you're interested in the politics of language itself, she’s extraordinary! but some poems i like far, far more than others, certainly.
— don mee choi (dmz colony) — translation, archives, memory, history... not always for me, but a really rewarding read when i am able to slow down.
— layli long soldier (whereas) — one of the most inventive collections i've read. she does fun things with legal language, bureaucracy, and silence. and form. which all three, you could argue is.

who else… you already know i love anne carson doooown. forever indebted to her and the way she’s constantly taking language apart and putting it back together again while acting as a… sieve, almost, to get to the absolute clearest version of a thought. i love, love, love that. i love poets who treat poetry as a process of thinking, who are interested in language itself. where words come from, how they accumulate meaning, how history lingers inside them. the architecture gets so thin and specific with poetry, so seeing the same shapes i know with the materials it provides is always a different kind of high. idk idk

and… also… alex dimitrov. we don’t always get along, but when we do, it’s magical. “the years,” they will never make me hate you.

not what you asked as well but i recently had the honour of being invited to a 4K restoration of a litany for survival (the audre lorde documentary) and doing some writing on it, and it’s just been very inspiring as i reckon with returning to writing. lorde had such a musical understanding of language and to see it in film/biographical form, featuring so many other poets (including such an endearing adrienne rich) was so… it really did feel like i was seeing the world in a new light for some days after.