inaugural february 12th edition
lovely things for the lonely aka happy lunar new year & valentine's day
The past year has felt especially lonely, moreso in the wake of holidays spent with the ghostly memories of past gatherings.
A few months ago, I read Mary Oliver’s Upstream. Besides falling in love with her devotion to nature, I felt comforted by her description of the writers she read as her friends when she was young. Words become companions in the pits of loneliness.
So, that’s what this newsletter is designed to be, a weekly roundup of writing to give you comfort. Inspired by those wonderful Twitter posts where readers share recommendations that you can get lost in.
There’s so much amazing writing that exists, but hopefully this will be a weekly launching ground to explore a few beauties.
With that said, the format I envision is about ten poems, five creative nonfiction pieces, and fiction pieces in no particular order sent into your inbox every Friday. Some weeks it might be more, some weeks it might be less.
Without further ado, I give you 20 recommendations for February 12th <3
Poetry
Daniel Zhang’s “Golden” in the Kenyon Review
“A baby is screaming and I wonder
what a baby has to scream about
so ferally.”Mandy Seiner’s “why is talking about kissing more intimate than kissing itself?” in perhappened magazine
“I buy a plant
every time a new person spends the night. in this
apartment, I’m up to an asparagus fern, a heart
philodendron, a snake plant, and a string of pearls.”Morgan Ekland’s “A Glossary of Fathers” in Whale Road Review
Anthony Thomas Lambardi’s “the profits of gravity” in Thrush
“i’ve severed
enough flesh
i can’t recognize
my reflection in storefronts—”Katie Manning’s “How Can You Tell If a Mushroom Is Poisonous” in Cotton Xenomorph
“Other mushrooms merely look poisonous
—morels could pass for shriveled brains—
and are the most delicious.”
Matthew Girolami’s “Cathedral” in The Believer
“blood would draw its borders on both of us”
Noreen Ocampo’s “PRIOR TO A TEARFUL CONFESSION THAT ISLAND LIFE IS PERHAPS NOT FOR ME” in HAD
“every day she tokyo drifts up to me
with a peach”Daad Sharfi’s “Yellow” in [PANK]
“if mischief is memory-making, i am
grateful for this image”Sarah Sophia Yanni’s “abode” in Hooligan Magazine
“sites of havoc rekindling fury I once thought lost”
Gabrielle Bates’ “Ownership” in Midst1
“That I have always loved a storm
that can't touch me is no secret.”
Prose
Fiction
Meredith Martinez’s “WHEN I SAY LOVE” from Contrary Magazine
“A cold fog rose from them, sweating her hair, her upper lip, how the flu tastes, like vinegar.”
Mike Schoch’s “Son” in Electric Lit’s The Commuter
“My amateur diagnosis, unkind: You have succumbed to the capitalist nightmare—prevented from earning anything of value, you cling to the useless like a child to its reeking security blanket.”
Melinda Taub’s “I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT MY WEDDING TO CAPTAIN VON TRAPP HAS BEEN CANCELED” in McSweeney’s
“I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says.”
Julie Chen’s “Six Youthful Encounters With Death” in Cheap Pop
“Every story I tell is a resurrection or an open casket.”
Julian Robert’s “Breast Cancer and Your Arm!” in Columbia Journal
“The chemo failed so quickly that I never lose my hair, so one of the cheerleaders must have seen in me a future Thriver, and she came over to become friends not seeing the tumors in my bones and liver.”
Nonfiction
J. E. Sills’ “Flamethrower” in Joyland Magazine
“Flame girl turns from the winter window to the sparse supper table upon which her mother asks for blessings.”
Kate Hopper’s “Defiant” in Brevity
“Your pulse beats, defiant, in the tender crook between thumb and forefinger. My gaze shifts between it and your face, your cheekbones prominent, your neck slack”
Steve Haruch’s “Queen Anne’s Lace in the Vanished Field” in Wildness
“Children are good at learning, but even so, they must be told, again and again, that the beauty they find is worthless.”
Rebecca Watson’s “Notes on Craft” in Granta
“I was possessed, for a year, by a woman whose name I do not know.”
Susan Sontag’s “Illness as Metaphor” and “AIDS and Its Metaphors” from The New York Review
“The melancholy character—or the tubercular—was a superior one: sensitive, creative, a being apart. Keats and Shelley may have suffered atrociously from the disease, but Shelley consoled Keats that “this consumption is a disease particularly fond of people who write such good verses as you have done.…” So well established was the cliché which connected TB and creativity that at the end of the century one critic suggested that it was the progressive disappearance of TB which accounted for the current decline of literature and the arts.”
I attended the Kenyon reading with Saeed Jones, Shira Erlichman, and Ross Gay on Tuesday. During the Q&A, Shira Erlichman made a great point about how seeing mania and depression as a mode of production was a framing set up by capitalism. It reminded me of Sontag’s essays, plus their relevance as we live through a time dominated by a contagion with a lot of unknowns.
got a recommendation? DM me on Twitter @existentialmail or emails me at existentialpoetics@gmail.com — I’d love to expand into showcasing writing opportunities as well~!
an innovative publishing that shows the process in which poems are written (!!!) using the timeline at the bottom of the page!