This is the best book I’ve read in a while. Intimate human entanglement in the pain of history, in what it means to live in history. Speaking of the pain of history. #sentenceoftheday

The physical object shall prevail. Without further notice. #sentenceoftheday

Saturday 3/29 at Hudson Valley Books for Humanity in Ossining @4! If you’re still out east and looking for an hour to catch your breath with books and conversation around habitat, catastrophe, embodiment, interbeing, Elizabeth Zuba and I’ll be celebrating Mary Newell’s ENTWINE. We’d love to see you!

Got caught behind a wildfire, one road back to the mainland, closed. Poisonwood smoke. Waited it out, feet in the water, waited for a pre-dawn opening to cross another scorched earth. Countless creatures dead, another countless. The state with the prettiest name.
#sentenceoftheday

Commit, recommit. Align, release. Go to the source. Not sure how it connects, this bit about the future, this future, the word from grow and become. #sentenceoftheday

Saved my life this brutal week to find out Chagall made these small collages with scraps of fabric and paper as preparatory sketches for his sublime stained glass windows at the Union Church. Amazing curator’s talk at this beautiful exhibit at the DR Center in Pocantico. Keep light alive, friends.

Don’t let the pilot light go out. Hear testimony. (All the banned keywords here: foreigner, queer, pandemic, AIDS, desire, resisting the disciplinary state). Don’t let them corrupt all the sentences, don’t let them lop them off into their fascist soundbites. #sentenceoftheday

Take back the word asylum, for starters. Take back all the words. Refuse the impoverishment of the language. Draw upon a mental armory. Microresistance. And macro too. #sentenceoftheday

Self-portrait as Giles Corey. More weight, more weight!

Happy weekend, friends. Resist!

If you are a teacher of English or a human being or both, you should go see Sanaz Toossi’s “English” on Broadway, a superb production of this breathtakingly simple classroom drama about the inexorably complex experience of bringing another language inside your body.

Tonight’s commute. Hortative let with bare infinitive taking subject. All the Xs are you. (Subjects in the objective case!) (I still shudder at the existential there.) Little prayer.

A little light on this darkest day: my 7th book, Disaster Porn, will be published by BOA in 2027. Pulling over for trash couches for years! Inspired by these pages by Maira Kalman, the book features The Husband, the Devil, Goya, teenage Cassandra, and the OG disaster porn—Pompeii.

#disasterporn

A bright note this week seeing ecopoems by writers at Bedford Hills CF in the pages of this issue of Exchange. Pam Hart brought the Floodwaters Workshops there—read her piece and remember what’s real. The climate crisis is real. People caused it. Mass incarceration is real, and unjust, and deadly.

I’m looking forward to being part of this conversation on Saturday at Manhattanville College, with thanks to Iain Haley Pollock for gathering us. Hope to see you there!

Thrilling to see Ceive on screen: Axial Theatre's short film "Robust Admixture," an adaptation of my novella in verse, can now be viewed here: www.axialtheatre.org With huge thanks to Cady McLain for her vision and these brilliant actors for their work.