nori was always so generous & insightful & gentle in her workshop feedback - I am so sad we won't get more of her poems and so grateful to hear how many lives she touched in how many ways.

BACKXWASH, God Has Nothing to do w/it
Katie Dey, never falter hero girl
Alex Walton, An Enviable Face
saoirse dream, everything*
Anohni, HOPELESSNESS
Wendy Carlos on The Shining & Clockwork Orange
G.L.O.S.S., 2015 demo
underscores, wallsocket
Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Primal Prayer-not noisy but do it

His 2017 sequel is "Don't Get On the Plane: Why a Sex Change Will Ruin Your Life" - glad to have him off the team.

Not a charter school activist & I'm a fan of your work in general, but you're fudging basic facts here, this is just not true in the Massachusetts charter structure.

Yeah, it's a pantoum! I thought the form was cool when I read John Ashbery's "Pantoum" and later AE Stallings' "Another Lullaby for Insomniacs", but I really fell in love with it through @taylorbyas.bsky.social's pantoums in _I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times_.

Two more sessions left on the evenings of 11/25 and 12/9, would love to have you if you're in Boston! Also please drop me a line if you'd like to run these with your own group, very happy to share my prompts / discussion questions / frame.

Some killer responses this week that I hope make it to the group zine, including an alternate universe Dear Sugar and a plaintive litany of questions about displacement & diaspora.

...an excerpt from Ginsberg's "America", Eduardo C. Corral's "Questions for My Body", Robert Bly's "Things to Think", Megan Fernandes's "Letter to a Young Poet", an excerpt from Molly Bashaw's "What to Expect", and @notquitehydepark.bsky.social's tear-jerking "Prayer for Werewolves".

Finally, this week we looked at imagining better futures even when we're allergic to positive thinking, through the devices of petition & advice. Readings included @chenchenwrites.bsky.social's "God, Gods, Powers, Lord, Universe--", Dean Rader's "America, I Do Not Call Your Name Without Hope"...

...and "Rise Again" by @catfitzpatrick.net (from a sequence in @picnic-mag.bsky.social #1 that you should really check out!). We wrote in response to tarot cards, images from @readeasel.bsky.social and Zachary Drucker / Rhys Ernst's _Relationship_, and delightfully to me, other participants' stuff.

...@deesoulpoetry.com's "Good Riddance", @leesessions.bsky.social's "A Poem Written By the Stretch of the US/Mexico Border That the Team Drives Under in a Tunnel at the End of the Fourth Movie..." (not gonna post the rest of this amazing chonker of a title but check out _2 Trans 2 Furious_)...

We followed that up in week 4 with drawing power from art, looking at ekphrasis: @heatherchristle.bsky.social's "Perfect Song", the William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden, and Paul Tran poems on Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" @taylorbyas.bsky.social's "Yellow Dress"...

Some really cool shares from this week - a number of multiple-path poems after "Obligations 2", a meditation on a giraffe in the window that I'm still thinking about, a piece that started out about houseplants and was A JOURNEY.

...Layli Long Soldier's "Obligations 2" and @jackiesabbagh.bsky.social "Laser" (which got my favorite analysis of the workshop: "girl, if that's laser for you how are you going to survive electro..." & we debated where in Somerville the poem takes place).

Week 3 was secret sources of strength - we looked at @josephfasano.bsky.social's Poem to Myself poem-template, Toi Derricotte's "A little prayer to our lady", @ilyakaminsky.bsky.social's "Letters", Lucille Clifton's "cutting greens"...

...poems in the "Someday I'll Love [X]" lineage descending from Frank O'Hara including "Someday I'll Love Roger Reeves" and poems descending from Gwendolyn Brooks' "To the Young Who Want to Die" including Ross Gay's "Sorrow Is Not My Name" and @britrogers.bsky.social's "I Am Too Pretty for This."

Week 2 we looked at love poems for a hostile world & a sometimes-hostile self - readings included "Old Song" by Nima Hasan, tr. @hudafakhreddine.bsky.social, from @miznaarabart.bsky.social, "Dedication" by Fady Joudah...

Penny Lane's brilliant _Listening to Kenny G_!!

Trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=mmgg5XObNl8