• Osip Mandelstam (trns Peter France), Black Earth: Selected Poems & Prose (New Directions 2021)
• Michael Kleber-Diggs, Worldly Things (Milkweed Editions 2021)
• Jim Harrison, The Theory & Practice of Rivers (1989), Letters to Yesenin (1973), After Ikkyu (1996) (in Complete Poems, Copper Canyon 2021) (rereads)
• Daniel Heller-Roazen, Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues & Riddlers (Zone Books 2013)

Last, next.

101: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Blue)
102: Signs of Spring (Quaker Ladies)

Last week, I finally made it to Subtext Books in downtown St Paul for the first time. Absolutely one of the best bookstores I’ve ever been to.

(Original series here, with subsequent discoveries here.)

• Henry Gould, The Green Radius (forthcoming, Contubernales Press 2024)
• Carla Sofia Ferreira, A Geography That Doesn’t Hurt Us (River River Books 2024)
• Han VanderHart, What Pecan Light (Bull City 2021)
• Warren F Motte Jr (ed), Oulipo: A Primer (Dalkey Press 1997)
• Clare Mac Cumhaill & Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Doubleday 2022)
• Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Phillipa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics (Oxford 2022)

My poem, “Leaving the Story Unfinished,” has just appeared as part Dusie’s long-running Tuesday Poem series.

Last, next.

100: Leap of Faith (4,704c)
101: Kraft Plus (Wednesday Blue)

Now playing:

—Russell Hoban, Pilgermann (1983)

SA4QE

I exist, said the mirror.
What about me? said Kleinzeit.
Not my problem, said the mirror.

—Russell Hoban, Kleinzeit (1974)

SA4QE

Don’t drive angry!

• Henry Gould, Stone (Copper Beech Press 1979)
• Robert Creeley, On Earth: Last Poems & and Essay (California 2006)
• JA Baker, The Peregrine (NYRB 2003) (reread)
• rob mclennan, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press 2022)
• Jenny Odell, Saving Time (Random House 2023)
• Bill Porter, Road to Heaven: Encounters with Chinese Hermits (Counterpoint 1993)

I wrote the last poems for Vessels in June of 2021.

But I feel like I finally finished the book this week when, after reviewing the galley proof, I submitted the last edits and my final About the Author and Acknowledgements drafts.

It’s all extravagant press junkets and groupies from here on out.

Last, next.

99: Snowy Evening (15,903)
100: Leap of Faith (4,704c)

This was long overdue. I deactivated it last November, but turned it back on a few weeks later to save my following/follower list. Then it lay dormant & forgotten for most of the year, except for some DMs to people who were still nowhere else & who were seemingly impervious to email. It’s time.

My wife and I met thirty years ago today.

I was invited over to a friend’s apartment to meet her — and she ignored me the whole time. No hello, no eye contact. Absolutely nothing. She was utterly unapproachable. Instead, she spent the evening in the other room, forehead-to-forehead with her friend, discussing and analyzing a VHS tape of the modern dance concert she’d choreographed a few weeks earlier. And I could see instantly how smart, articulate, beautiful, and, most of all, strong she was.

We began dating eleven months later, and married eleven months after that. Twenty-two months that seemed, at the time, to span thirty years. And now, thirty years that seem, at times, to have spanned barely twenty-two months. Well, that’s time for you.

Some stories belong to the breath, not to the pixel and keyboard. Some stories need the counterpoint of digressions and indignant amendments, of interruptions to refill the wine glass or the bread bowl, or to choose more music, album by album. They need the bustle and patience of a long evening, the wood and steel rhythms of a well-provisioned table.

So: to hear the rest of the story, you’ll need to be seated across from us, favorite beverage at your elbow, and all the time in the world. And perhaps a story or two for us in exchange.

I mailed out the first batch of chapbook orders last week, and I’m ready to open it up to people beyond my newsletter subscribers.

Visit this Very Secret Page for instructions on how to buy a copy.

• Henry Gould, The Green Radius (1–38, 39–72) (WIP 2023)
• Kyla Houbolt, Surviving Death (Broken Spine 2023)
• J-T Kelly, Like Now (Subpress/CCCP 2023)
• Robert Richardson, Three Roads Back (Princeton 2023)

Last, next.

98: Harvest (Orleans Reinette Apples)
99: Snowy Evening (15,903)

Now playing:

• Jane Huffman, Public Abstract (American Poetry Review 2023)
• Louise Glück, The Triumph of Achilles (1985), Meadowlands (1996), Ararat (1990) (in Poems 1962–2012, FSG 2012)
• Richard Jeffrey Newman, T’shuvah (Fernwood Press 2023)
• Jared Beloff, Who Will Cradle Your Head (ELJ Editions 2023)
• Henry Gould, Holy Fool (Self-published 2023)
• Graeber & Wengrow: The Dawn of Everything (Picador 2022)
• Robert Richardson, Emerson: The Mind on Fire (University of California 1995)

Now playing:

Now playing:

Last, next.

97: Autumn Trilogy (Scarlet Oak)
98: Harvest (Orleans Reinette Apples)

Now playing:

To mark the day her eyes closed and mine stayed open: Polly