i think that jenny zhang is the first poet i read that made me go "ohhhhhhhh - i get it now." about poetry; i had always recognized the beauty of the language without understanding the stakes and naked human expression that language serves to meaningfully represent through it's beauty. some of my favorite works from her:
Poem: “Follow Him” By Jenny Zhang (buzzfeednews.com)
under the chiming bell by Jenny Zhang - Poems | Academy of American Poets
maybe it's because i read night sky with exit wounds very shortly after i got introduced to zhang's work but i always felt a sort of similarity between them, where vuong was concerned with reconciling the world they lived in and harmed them, zhang felt more concerned with keeping the score.
we got a movie discord we got a zine discord when's the poetry discord dropping...
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i think of this poem pretty regularly, and the rest of her backlist is good too (linked it for you :) )
May 4, 2024
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maybe my answer is basic, but despite always having loved writing poetry i haven't actually read much of it until recently. we covered this poem in a course i was taking and it's just so good.
i just finished Ocean Vuong's "Night Sky With Exit Wounds" and it was so good as well, one of my favorites was "Thanksigivng 2006".
another poet i could recommend is Aimee Seu, i'm hoping to buy her book "Velvet Hounds" soon, a poem i love by her is called "Thrift Store Fur".
lastly, another poet i really love is chen chen. i really recommend reading "Summer"!
Jun 3, 2024
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But if that was the case, if poems could be anything at all, then why is the default to cringe
whenever someone writes a poem about their feelings? Even worse if that someone is a
teenager? Even worse if that someone is no longer a teenager but nonetheless thinks
about themselves with the kind of intensity that is only acceptable between the ages of
thirteen and nineteen?
Jan 24, 2024
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Mar 23, 2024
a treatise on the attention economy - checked it out on libby and got through it over the course of a work day, a lot of really interesting social and cultural explorations about how time itself is the final frontier of hypercapitalism and what decommodification of our attention and time should look like
the book starts with a story about the oldest redwood tree in oakland and how the only reason it’s still standing is bc it’s unmillable, and how being uncommercializable is essential to our survival. it ends with an exploration of alt social media platforms (mostly p2p ones) and what keeping the good parts of the social internet and rejecting the bad ones should look like
all in all a super valuable read; my only nitpick with the book is that odell isn’t just charting the attention economy but also attempting to “solve” it and relate it back to broader concepts about labor and social organizing, but her background is in the arts which leads to some really wonderful references to drive the points home while also missing some critical racial + socioeconomic analyses that one would expect (or at least really appreciate) from the book she promises to deliver in the introduction. but this does also make the book easier to read which is good because everyone should definitely engage with what she has to say
will definitely be revisiting
Mar 25, 2024
