Books
📚 15/31 PORTAGE by Sarah Ann Winn. Excerpt from “Alma”: “Gorge of girl, shaped by erosion, gorgeous, engorged by trees..” ♥️ Another beautiful collection. #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 14/31 SEED, STAR, SONG by May Chong. Excerpt from “Tembeling”: “The new rubies/of wild cinnamon leaves, and/the jewelbox of jungle flowers/are this earth’s exclamation:/we are still alive.” ♥️♥️♥️ Every poem in this collection is gorgeous. #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 13/31 MOTHER IS THE NAME FOR GOD by Judith Kingston. Excerpt from “III. Pentheus, My Son: “I never knew love until I became a mother./I was gentle and meek as a maid,but now I am a fierce lioness.” Bacchae is sadder than I remembered. #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 12/31 WHEN I WAS A GIRL by Jennifer Jackson Berry. Excerpt: “the boy will be stiff if & only stiff/if the girl is light as a feather & not bored.” #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 11/31 NEGOTIATING WITH OBJECTS by Lisa M Cole. Excerpt from “After the Ever-Glow”: “The hearse. The hearsay./The hypothesis of your body:/a perfectly measured cake.” #TheSealeyChallenge
Want to read: Bad Habits by Amy Gentry 📚
📚 8/31 CHICKENHAWKS & GOLDILOCKS by Grey Vild. Excerpt from “A prayer no one wants to”: “But you smiled when you traced my name in your inventory & I unspooled, fled my tethers, reached so far into the sun no one could find me.” #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 7/31 SPACE BABY: EPISODES I - III by Nicole Oquendo. Excerpt from “I.vi.”: “You have read about the cats of a far planet, how the tamers/will poke with a wooden sword until the animals lean on hind legs/in a kind of stance. Never you.” Sexy and creepy. #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 6/31 WOLF DAUGHTER by Amy Watkins. Excerpt from “sixteen”: “It was my voice she wanted,/as I wanted her hair under my chin,/her changing self held this close/for what instinct tells us could be the last time.” More monstrous women, more metamorphoses. #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 5/31 [RE]CONSTRUCTION OF THE NECROMANCER by Hannah V. Warren. Excerpt from “Forgetting More Than I Thought I Did”: “I want to be flesh & warm & unscathed/but skin bruises easier than exoskeleton” ♥️ monstrous women #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 4/31 TO THE BONE by Angela Narciso Torres. Excerpt from “Self-portrait as Water”: “most forgiving of/substances, I resolve/to live like you—to fill/and be filled,/to take the shape/of my vessel/dispensing heat/displacing matter/lighter than air" #TheSealeyChallenge
Currently reading: ‘Making It’ as a Contract Researcher: A Pragmatic Look at Precarious Work by Nerida Spina, Jess Harris, Simon Bailey, Mhorag Goff 📚
📚 3/31 ELECTRIC ARCHES by Eve L. Ewing. Excerpt from “to the notebook kid”: “it’s that flows and flows and flows/and lines like that rip-roaring/bits you got/bars til the end of time/you could rap like/helium bout to spring” ♥️ this collection, so joyful #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 2/31 NOT HERE by Hieu Minh Nguyen. Excerpt from “Heavy”: “There are days when I give up on my body/but not the world.” #TheSealeyChallenge
📚 1/31 UNACCOMPANIED by Javier Zamora. Excerpt from “Then, It Was So”: “…Cariño,/it was so quiet when I started/counting the days/I wasn’t woken by him.” #TheSealeyChallenge
#TheSealeyChallenge Link Roundup 📚
I’ve been looking for ways to read more books and talk to more people about them, so when the Book Riot piece, Will You Join The Sealey Challenge? came across my radar, it made sense to answer YES.
During the month of August, participants read a poetry chapbook or full-length collection a day for 31 days while sharing their reads on social media using the hashtag #TheSealeyChallenge, named after poet Nicole Sealey and coined by Dante Micheaux during its first year.
Here are several links where you can learn more about the challenge and find suggestions of what to read:
- Nicole Sealey: Why I Read a Poetry Book Every Day For a Month (Bookmarks)
- The Sealey Challenge: An Expansive Way of Reading Poetry (Lithub)
- 31 Poets Recommend 31 Poetry Books to Read Every Day in August (Electric Literature)
- Every Poem Is a Love Poem to Something: An Interview with Nicole Sealey (The Paris Review)
- On the value of reading poetry together—and apart—in the current moment. (Lithub)
I myself will be reading a combination of library ebooks selected from recommendations linked in the Book Riot piece, e-chaps from Sundress Publications, and whatever I’ve got lying around the house. So you can expect that in addition to modern new-to-me poets, there will be some children’s collections of e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, one day of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, and maybe even a YA verse novel or two.
Let me know if you decide to join in!
Just added new content to my reading page 📚: updated 2020 reading goals, a 2-books-read:1-book-bought ratio plan, plans for a “My Week in Reading” series, my favorite books to carry around/re-read, and links to the my favorite reading advice.
Finished reading: Paperback Crush: The Totally Radical History of ’80s and ’90s Teen Fiction by Gabrielle Moss 📚