Having loved Tommy Pico's NATURE POEM, I went back to read his first book, IRL. I highlighted so many moments (odyssey across Williamsburg, horrid bar conversation, Brooklyn backyard fireworks party that yields moonwalking and his grandmother and the residential schools).

I thought I'd posted about reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's THE SERVICEBERRY, but I hadn't, so just in time for Indigenous Peoples' Day, here was the first book I read this past summer, as soon as I could rest from other obligations!

Today in book joy: For years I've been assigning Audre Lorde's epilogue to her collection, A BURST OF LIGHT AND OTHER ESSAYS; I wanted my students to know who first defined self-care--"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

Today in book joy (and heartbreak): It's hard to choose among all the heartbreaks in Naomi Shihab Nye's 2019 THE TINY JOURNALIST. In the poem "Janna," "At 7, making videos. /At 10, raising the truth flag," Nye writes in the voice of the eponymous tiny journalist:

Today in book joy:
When I finally read Jodi Savage's essay collection THE DEATH OF A JAYBIRD this summer, I was struck over and over by the craft. The entire work is incisive, witty, unflinchingly honest, and just as unflinchingly, deeply compassionate, without a trace of sentimentality.

Today in book joy: I've been teaching the first chapter of Julie Otsuka's THE BUDDHA IN THE ATTIC in my Bodies of Water course for the first of two units on border crossings and immigration; this summer I devoured the whole novel over two evenings.

I first loved Marcos Gonsalez's brilliant critical essays on membership in communities that are LGBTQ+, Mexican and Puerto Rican, undocumented folks and U.S. citizens. PETRO'S THEORY: REIMAGINING THE PROMISED LAND turned my mind toward the theorizing of vulnerabilities.

Today in book joy/reflection: Miller Oberman's THE UNSTILL ONES.
When I got to his translation of "The Ruin," these lines just took my breath away. "The repairers died." What happens to a culture, a world, when the repairers die, when there are no more generations to make things right again?

I've been using excerpts from Alexis Pauline Gumbs's UNDROWNED for years, ever since it was first taught to me by the great ecocritic (and my former student) Quinn Luthy. "This section looks at the revolutionary parenting and community-care practices modeled by marine mammals....

For the foreseeable future, book recommendations: I'm just going to post the most delightful and illuminating books I've read this summer and fall.
First: Randa Jarrar, LOVE IS AN EX-COUNTRY.

Over on Instagram I posted a remembrance of Morgan Lopez, a writer, dancer, and former student of mine, who graduated from Lang in 2020 and left us too soon.
www.instagram.com/p/DN5wbJkDcmo/

In my garden right now: Ozark witch hazel "Amethyst." The entire tiny tree is only about a foot tall; you don't notice it walking by, till you do.

Rescued sea turtle, photo by Michael Brady who is on no social media whatsoever.

Seen at NJ Transit. If I were NJ Transit, maybe I'd think twice about volunteering comparisons of service quality between me and...well, anybody, let alone Harriet Tubman.

The garden had a rough time this fall with the drought, but it still managed to bring out a little fall color. The itea (red/purple foreground) is a gift that keeps giving.

I tend to make pot pies for Friendsgiving. This was 8 years ago. I didn't think I'd need to save the puff pastry letters for another time around. The resistance requires more pastry!