Since it’s print only and Plin was feeling extra participatory, here’s what my piece looks like in @thetoerag Decadence issue along with several of its referential objects (order here + link in bio ) Other great contributors to this issue include @kukukadoo , Anne Carson, and Philippa Snow.
3.
It’s 2025. America is in crisis. Criticism is. I have a renewed sense of mortality and the delicate balance of being. I sit on top of my duvet and look at Robert Motherwell rectangles like I’m falling off the edge of the picture plane where the rectangle isn’t bounded, where the space theoretically extends infinitely into paint or void. I feel like a faun just getting its legs.“
Read @saintsoftness as part of our No. 4. Unpaywalled.
edits & german translation: @samir.manuel.sellami
blnreview.de
Apparently I never posted this to my grid when the contract was reported in Publisher’s Weekly this summer, so uh, as you all already probably know, here’s my next book, THESE NEW FRAGILITIES, coming from @7storiespress in 2028. Get ready for living in lateness, images of atrocity, the French Rococo, postwar Japanese architecture, Sarah Kane, Rilke, Derek Jarman and more…
Spending some time with Watteau’s Embarkation to Cythera, a stranger painting that a first glance reveals and one that just might be the choice to end a book with. Some details, exquisite even with craqueler and varnish wear. The possibility of an idyll in haze and salmon-pink silks…
I would normally never put my family on social media but I’m breaking the rules because @booksandbooks and @mitchellakaplan made my whole month. I grew up going to Books & Books in Miami, Florida. Mitch Kaplan was incredibly kind to this 16 year old with stringy hair and nerd glasses who came to all the new lit release talks. My parents drove me every time. I bought the TLS in paper there and I read it on the patio of my high school. I grew up. I started writing reviews— the first one was in the TLS. I wrote my first book, We The Parasites, about how much literature and art form an embodied, intrinsic critical part of me. My parents are standing in the bookstore I grew up in holding that book. I’m coming down there on the tour for next one if they’ll have me. It’s so rare we get these full circle moments in life. Thank you, Books & Books, and Mitch— for stocking the titles that made me a writer, and then decades later, coming back for mine. If you ever have any doubt that independent bookstores change lives, this is your proof.
Insomnia spread. She reads the @the.tls by biting it. (I am looking forward to Ackroyd’s Auden biography after I close the book this summer, and reading all the reviews as a taster.) Mendelson will always be a touchstone for me though…
Both on here and elsewhere I have talked before about how moving I’ve found Shangyang Fang’s (@shangyang_fang ) new translation of Song Dynasty poetry from @copper_canyon_press — and how timely. Now in the autumn of empires I come back to it again and again. One more poem… You can buy the book from an excellent indie press that takes great risks in translation at the link in my current Stories post. I don’t read Classical Chinese but this is one of the translations that makes me want to desperately after I close the TNF book manuscript.
Some brief shots of the CFGNY exhibit at the press preview at Amant today. Was really struck by how their practice manages to transcend medium as formal boundary without ignoring its physical and material implications. Will probably write on this in some form, but also enjoy it— it’s enjoyable!
I had to chase her around to get Pad Thai off her forehead. My living room is covered in fun boxes. I’m behind on grading. I should be reading Simone Weil with an ardent seriousness. Yet I am on the sofa, and she looks back at me like this, and who am I, in the end, to protest?
