Good Cry
What I enjoyed in July
Reading
Super quick recs this time, owing to my mostly catatonic month. On the reading end, I would love to take this opportunity to once again recommend the Cleveland Review of Books, which keeps getting better and was already great. They’ve developed a niche or a voice that seems to me both irreverent and serious, totally current with deadpan irony, yet refusing cynicism or despair, even if messily. In the latest print issue, Laura Jaramillo’s poems really knocked me out—with images like
sunrise broken open
against rowhome
roof matchbox town
still and stretched
before us
yolked in
egg tempera
and questions like
what does it mean to write poetry at the sunset of literacy
The essays are sharp and tethered to what matters. The fiction is weird and compelling. I would, quite simply, get one.
Or you know what, maybe since I’m here what I want to do is gently encourage you to pick a literary magazine to subscribe to. There are soooooo many good ones and they’re pretty much all affordable, punching above their weight, just absolutely contribute a unique good in their mix of genres and their ability to expose you to concerns/styles/forms that you might naturally resist even slightly, but which, especially when encountered between gorgeously designed pages, will enrich you unpredictably. Here’s a pretty random list in no particular order (!!):
Listening
In addition to the Belair Lip Bombs (whose new record Again I recommended last month, but who appear in this month’s collage because I forgot)…
I’ve been spinning Asher White’s cover album Jessica Pratt. I find it much more compelling than Pratt’s original, but in fairness I just learned about this important artist last month; her music didn’t nestle in my bones when it came out in 2012, but I can understand how it might have, speculate about what it means for those who’ve lived with it all this time.
What I love about White’s approach is the wide open space between the damp piano of “Bushel Hyde” and the unhinged feedback of “Casper,” or even further, the banjo stomp of “Mountain’r Lower.” Where Pratt’s music threads a coherent voice through everything, White’s interpretation makes room for a huge color palette. It’s an accomplishment to say so much with such a grand gesture of respect.
cry hard lovely