Good News in History, June 26

“Our tongues tie trying / to articulate the knot,” writes Serena Chopra in her simultaneously tender and exacting new collection A Catalog of Future Mercies. When she writes, later, “I pry this intimacy with my teeth,” I believe her.

Throughout, Chopra provides us with snippets with patient circuity, of family stories, myths, rituals, to illustrate the means by which she more deeply understands herself. Overall, reading A Catalog of Future Mercies has the effect of watching an embroidery stitch, at times loose and confusing as the needle punches through fabric, until an expert finger pulls the thread taught.

After several graceful, meditative pages, we piece together the circumstances, which start almost a century ago, with Chopra’s paternal grandparents. Her grandfather was mentally ill, an alcoholic; her grandmother attempted suicide multiple times in a nearby river. As a child, Chopra’s father often had to coax his mother away from the waterway. One night, he locks himself in a room to hide from his father during a manic rage. Chopra’s grandfather throws gasoline and burns the door. The boy escapes out a window and over the garden wall.

“How did we get here?” is a question that hounds those in moments of extremis. The terrible pains of Chopra’s father and grandparents extend into the next generation, hurled epithets, bruised eyes, family secrets. Chopra explains how her father gave her little information, “sparing me the complex uneasiness.” A few reticent decades are enough to render life-defining hurts to mere fuzzy suspicion for those who come after.

Through interviews and divination, Chopra fuses these fragmented knowledges largely through interviews with her father, who shares what he previously kept hidden. His sentences fray as he approaches the unutterable facts (his mother’s attempted suicides, the devastating assaults by her mother-in-law driving her to such extremity, his father’s erratic behavior). Chopra bears witness to these histories with compassion. As Divya Victor writes in her praise for the book, “A Catalog of Future Mercies emerges into our world at a time of recoil and horror to change how we address our untended capacity for forgiveness.”

Below are Chopra’s annotations to her to-read pile, as well as some fun details about her nightstand and its trinkets.

Two corner shelves make my nightstand. They are live edge wood, made by a former student of mine who is an excellent carpenter. The shelves host: a coaster for my cup of water, a candle for romance, two stacks of books, three notebooks each with a pen in a pen loop, a yellow jade Pixiu charm from the poet Sueyeun Juliette Lee, an amber pendant from my grandmother, a peace lily, three bamboo, jade from the PNW coast and a tiger’s eye, a flower-pressed love letter, a beloved photo in a blue frame, and often a hungry cat in the morning.

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Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As She Preserved Them (ed. Cristanne Miller)

I had a garden party. We were sitting by the fire, and a friend asked me who was my favorite poet. I couldn’t answer that question but said that one of my favorite poems was Dickinson’s “The Brain, is wider that the Sky” and I suddenly found myself passionately inside the lecture I give to students about the poem. My friends listened, generously, as I discussed that poem and the posthumous editorial contention that Dickinson’s poems endured. At some point, I mentioned that all three of my Dickinson collections were falling apart. A few months later, my friends gifted me this collection edited by Cristanne Miller, who offers a keen method for encountering Dickinson’s work via Dickinson’s arrangement of her own poems into a series of handstitched fascicles made between 1858-1865. Miller’s scholarship seamlessly balances fastidious research with an attempted-mint presentation of Dickinson’s vision for her work.

Aside from the fascicles, Miller includes poems from unbound sheets and loose poems sent in correspondence and/or transcribed by others. This comprehensive collection is nonetheless accessible and clearly organized, allowing one to feel Dickinson’s attention to and awareness of her own poems and their resonances, in this book, I don’t merely read the poems, but experience kinship with the poet’s constellating mind, drawing me to reflect on my own impulses with arrangement and the poignant, electric empathy that exists for a poet between their poems. I return to this book multiple nights a week, continually curious to investigate how a poet’s body of work moves like an extended conversation, a dynamic durational activity between poet, poem, and the poetic (where poetic is not genre, but a way of being and being with). In this Dickinson collection I encounter the poet’s body of work “in the guts of the flux,” via Selah Saterstrom’s articulations in Ideal Suggestions, where contradiction, multiplicity, simultaneity, risk, and disorientation are “non-negotiable” imperatives for “participation (reading and writing)” in the flux of being.

Susan Briante, Defacing the Monument

I am reading this book for the second time because it is a revolution. Defacing the Monument offers an imperative contemporary poetics, one that I believe we cannot step away from; one that, for me, presents a profound and timely answer to Andrew Joron’s opening question in The Cry at Zero: “What good is poetry at a time like this?” Part documentary project, part investigation of documentary praxis and ethics, Briante’s book simultaneously critiques Documentary Poetics while acting as a primer for new approaches to the field. However, Briante’s book reaches further than the Documentary Poetics field, it articulates an urgent, poignant, and necessary poetics bolstered by compassion, awareness, self-reflection, expansion, recalibration, and accountability. This book keeps my feet on the ground and my heart connected to the greater pulse suffering under late-stage capitalism and fascism. Briante writes, “…my compassion must compel me to see the ways directly or indirectly that I am implicated in [other’s] suffering.” At a time like this, poetry must embrace a compulsion for awareness. I keep this book close, it’s like an extended mantra for me, I aim to embody its poetics in my creative and critical practices, my pedagogy, and my daily life.

Sappho, If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (tr. Anne Carson)

A book I once lost, this copy was given to me by my lover, in which she inscribes, “This love of language we share is worth so much to me. Enjoy these exceptional fragments.” Returned to me, I sleep near to Sappho once again. These “exceptional fragments” are portals. I return to them to unearth what I cannot consciously ascertain. They will not surface, they call me to descend. They are divinatory technologies wresting me from static logics, churning me unmapped, lost, equipping me with night vision. I read a fragment directly before sleeping, beginning again and again (as Stein suggests), falling into Sappho’s portals, sleepwalking, visceral yet latent, approaching an instinct of islands between seas tumbling me into dream. When I wake on the portal’s shore, it is the desire to catch what still glimmers in the dream’s wake that stirs my “love for language.” Sappho and her fragments divine me. She draws me to understand that my love for language is a desire to be in proximity to the fragment, which is a desire to witness the portals that are within and anterior to language before language arrives (or, after it departs, is lost, to stand on the brief shore of its return). This reminds me of Barbra Guest’s “spatial freedom,” and is also described by Stevens in Idea of Order at Key West: “The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, / Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, / And of ourselves and of our origins, / In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.”

Christopher Marmolejo, Red Tarot: A Decolonial Guide to Divinatory Literacy

This year, I had the immense pleasure of being on a Queer Divinatory Poetics roundtable panel at the New Orleans Poetry Festival with Christopher Maramolejo, where I learned about their work and this incredible book. Red Tarot offers a keen, perceptive, tender, and radical approach to the Tarot, foregrounding decolonial liberation via modalities that engage reading “with the whole…socially matrixed body,” towards the “artistry of dissent.” Regardless of one’s experience with the Tarot, this book offers profound, embodied wisdoms for creative and critical writers, artists, and activists. Marmolejo brilliantly weaves the Tarot into imperative conversation with significant theorists and writers such as José Muñoz, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Paulo Friere, Louise Althusser, Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldúa, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Octavia Butler, among many others. In the introduction, Marmolejo writes, “Red reading is strategic to resist and confound the identity states white supremacy prescribes. Red readers resist assimilation; they work with dominant cultural modes and materia and restructure them from within to render themselves free and self-fashioned.” I’ve indulged this book, slowly, daily, card-by-card, and it is a deep education. I turn to Red Tarot, to observe, sharpen, and recalibrate my critical awareness and liberatory praxes for reading, writing, and being.

Georges Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality

I am reading this book for a project I am currently researching and writing. I am particularly interested in Bataille’s conversation about the relationship between violence and eroticism, and his bold, complex conflation of the drives underpinning each. The book offers a sharp (but complicated) critical apparatus for thinking about these abstract themes individually and in conjunction, through historical, psychological, embodied, and practical gestures. The book’s thinking operates on a discomforting familiarity that requires readers to trust Bataille’s journey alongside gristly observations and impulses. I sense that I gravitated to this book to nourish and complicate threads along the fine seams of loss/losing, violence, and queer eroticism, which are significant to my current project.