HerRead

A couple of new posts up at O is for Octopus substack...

https://open.substack.com/pub/jenssread/p/hot-take?r=w3xl&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true

Friends, have you devoured Jenny Molberg's The Court of No Record yet? A powerhouse commute-in form & syntax- Receipts for revising trauma's sentence- So. Stinking. Smart. Check it out!

Super geeked to share this forthcoming monster dropping THIS FALL! Now available for pre-order!

What is it? Here's rockstar Jenny Molberg's take, "Boys Behind Glass opens a door hidden behind a mirror--and I fell straight through. Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male gaze inside out. In conversation with Jenny Walton's haunting watercolor portrait series, "Match/Enemy," Jennifer Sperry Steinorth sifts through fragmented narratives to uncover the complexities of testimony, embodied trauma, justice, and complicity. Where silence and spectacle have long sheilded power, this book holds its provocative glare. Ok, Archaic Torso of Apollo--I see you."

glimpses of last week's new orleans bliss meeting with so many dear friends of CD Wright and reading and ! not pictured: fantastic panels & performances, illuminating conversations, & the dizzy of jasmine & magnolia & gardinia...with deep deep gratitude to , , , , Rodney Jones, , , , , , , , , and so many others....merci, merci.

it's been stretch since I sent new poems into the world so it was a real boon to receive the gorgeous issue of Nelle w two quirky fairy tale poems inside along so many poets I admire!...these are from a project in the works since 2019....slow & (sometimes!) steady as she goes...

thank you thank Nelle editors & women of the C.D. Wright conference. 🙏🏻

Last year I was awarded a substantial grant to travel to Mexico in C.D's footsteps (thank you Institute for Research on Women & Gender at UofM, I am still pinching myself), my first visit to this great country. My spanish is mostly non existant (I'm working on it) but we speak in many tongues and much transcends my vast ignorance....

Here we are in our first stop...the stunningly beautiful city of Guanajuato.

A few favorite things:

cats on high balcony walls (not pictured, they are fast!)

the scale which feels so beautifully human: the brick street outside our flat so narrow to get out stops traffic: a line of cars, scooters, delivery trucks stacked up the hill and no one honking as we heave luggage out the boot and scurry to hug the walls and let the patient carry on

how from the balcony i could look and look and look day after day and always see something new...today that wash of green, the same shade as the metal bars of that window four teirs down.

the everywhere brightly enameled and terracotta pots with their tended living sculptures, ruffling or blooming or prickly or all at once, azalea cascading through the cavity of a stucco wall, the insistant coos of pigeons, church bells I only sometimes made sense of, but which are clearly not decorative, wrung with insistance and expediancy (what kind of job to ring the bell every quarter hour? and how am i only now considering the ways churches have been real time time keepers... betimes assaulting with time?)

the color color color--especially varying shades of previous washes permeating through the foremost's crumble

the simultaneity of composition and decomposition, a light dust on the freshly laundered clothes left too long on the line

and the beautiful snarls of electrical wires!! more on those to come...

Guanajuanto, queremos volver a ti y quedarnos. Gracias.

Excited to be headed to CA to read in Ukiah and then interview some hero poets for the CDWright biography!

I threw my back out a few weeks ago and wasnt sure i was gonna make it but I'm on the big flight now so 🤞🏻!