Friday Links: Celebrating Indie Art Edition
“boy look into this lens, let me remember you / like this, carefree, acting a fool like you always do.” - Taylor Byas, “How Young Boys Survive The Ghetto: 101”
The last few weeks have had an unusually high amount of articles I’ve enjoyed? Am I just in a good mood? Aw hell. Putting together last week’s Friday Links, I kinda had two themes emerge: cool indie weirdo art, and ACAB. The latter seemed to pair with Chain-Gang All-Stars so well I actually altered this week’s reading schedule to pair with these links. That’s right, I read a bunch of writers whose books I either picked up at AWP or plausibly could’ve picked up at AWP! So it’s a more fun Friday than last week! Speaking of AWP, have you listened to this month’s The Line Break podcast yet?
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
There’s a collage nature to a collection. Especially with poems, you maybe don’t have an aboutness, no “this book is about a guy hunting a whale,” no “this book is about a Dracula.” Instead, you have recurring images, themes alluded to and twisted and shifted, images and metaphors whose meanings move around like leaves fenced into a backyard yet blown by the wind all the same. The same is more or less true of story anthologies—there’s an explicit or implicit prompt, but over the course of a few hundred pages, no author repeats. None of these books have marching orders, they have vibes to carry with you, they have subtle ways of shifting your consciousness. I’m talking, of course, about I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas, The New Testament by Jericho Brown, and Out There Screaming, edited by Jordan Peele.
I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times by Taylor Byas: oooooh baby we’re gonna verb some nouns! This collection does a lot of my favorite formalist poetry things: messing with received forms, anaphora, sequels to poems showing up like mile markers on a trail throughout the text. These poems are always playing with expectations, living in different definitions of words, always one step ahead of the reader’s understanding, but in a friendly way. No mention of the south side of Chicago, violence, sex, drinking, not drinking, church, Grandma’s house, dancing, anything in this book—none of it is ever one thing. Often—and I’m guilty of this too—books by marginalized writers involving things that seem foreign to the WBEZ-listening readership get talked about only in those terms. There are poetics at work in this book (and in every book you’ll see me cover here, of course), and I hope that is the way this book is discussed.
That said, Nate Marshall’s blurb (accurately) states: “So many of the greatest poets in the American tradition have been Chicago Black women, and this debut collection is an announcement that one more joined that proud tradition…” And yeah, these are poems written by a Black woman from the south side of CHICAGO. Don’t call it Chiraq. And like you would reading anyone from Gwendolyn Brooks to Eve L. Ewing, know that these are poems that aren’t to be pigeonholed. Like the south side itself.
Bonus second epigraph: “to cough up the mind’s desires. The Chicago skyline / undulates into view like a vision, glitters” - from “South Side (VI)”
The New Testament by Jericho Brown: right away, this book feels spiritual. There’s a musicality to these poems, a sense that each line is being written at an altar. Don’t get me wrong, there is very quickly violence, racism, homophobia—y’know, the primary colors of this great nation. Hey, Cain was an early character in the Bible and “Cain” is an early poem in this book. Yet the poems and speaker have a hardness, a certain clear-eyed view of reality that you might not associate with “spiritual.” Another collection where the poems are full, multitudinous, resistant to easy readings. It rips.
Out There Screaming edited by Jordan Peele: in lieu of commentary, I’m going to give the stories B-movie loglines.
“The Norwood Trouble” by Maurice Broaddus: the story of an all-Black town in Indiana defending themselves from a Klan attack, and the importance of remembering the Old Ways and sharing community stories. A tree cuts a white boy’s tongue out.
“Eye and Tooth” by Rebecca Roanhorse: A story of monsters sneaking, squabbling, eating, and taking care of each other.
“The Rider” by Tananarive Due: two women taking a bus to join the Freedom Riders in Montgomery meet a different kind of passenger in the swamp.
“Pressure” by Ezra Clayton Daniels: a reunion of cousins, an accident with expensive shaving cream, and did you ever read about the old lady who swallowed a fly?
LINKS!
Something to listen to while you browse? Tim Armstrong’s Instagram pointed me to The Calamatix, in case you want some bouncy ska on a Friday.
Only tangentially adjacent to cool indie art, but a celebration of our shared humanity: cool anti-Silicon Valley vandalism stuff! at recounts the burning of a Waymo driverless car in San Francisco. I am very here for this New Luddites movement—a rejection of tech that is harmful to commonality—and people getting so frustrated with Silicon Valley that they’re torching Google cars is a good sign for society. A lot of 21st century technology has been good! A lot of really high-profile examples have been very bad! We should be able to reject this stuff instead of slurping up the slop whenever they make it shiny enough.
Sportswriting is an art, and being allegedlyallegedlyallegedly fired from Yahoo! because a petty billionaire didn’t like being called out accurately as a scumbag lording over a predatory loans company,
counts as an indie artist. Over at , Kelly has a great view of All-Star weekend from a workers’ perspective. Workers in the arena, workers plugging away for the league and its various sponsorship partners, the players themselves as workers, and sportswriters as workers.Absolutely necessary pep talk from
at on the importance of writers finishing things. Finish things, especially if you (like me, and apparently like Lincoln) love getting Writer ADHD Brain and mentally jumping around projects that would be cool to do one day. Finish things. I was 34 when I learned this lesson, and writing about R.L. Stine. You don’t have to write a book a month like Stine, but finish things.Now, your friendly neighborhood Shipwrecked Sailor’s chill-time-seeking, peace-love-and-pass-the-cheeseburgers, affable stoner persona is not an act. It’s no secret I prefer a beach to most of living. And it’s certainly no secret how I feel about the police. That said, I really enjoyed True Detective: Night Country—a cop show set in the Arctic—to the point where I’m going to have to admit I’ve a huge True Detective fanboy. Cosmic horror, political corruption, and art house cinematography? Sign me right the hell up. I’ve watched the first and third seasons multiple times—they heavily influenced multiple portions of Vine. I’ll re-watch Season 4 at some point. Anyway, I’ve been reading up on the show and got led to the ENDLESS NIGHT photo series by Alexander Gronsky, a series of photos from the Polar Night in Murmansk, Russia.
Talking too damn much about these links. Some of these I write while drinking coffee! H/T to
at for turning me onto from a secret location, an archive of folded (and current) lit mags. The archivist in me loves this project. The dude-who-just-spent-$140-at-the-AWP-bookfair in me feels even more grateful for our community. Becky said, “It’s just delightful to see these old-school mags, what’s changed, what hasn’t, and to be reminded that as journals come and go, we are all part of a long history of editors, writers, poets, readers and artists doing our thing.” Yeah, that feels good.
What’re you still doing here? Go check out Cotton Xenomorph! “Cryptids and Climate Change” is rolling out! All these stories and poems rip, and I should know!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. When the shift becomes a slog, when the customers are unreasonable and screaming at you, the boss is a dick—may you have art to return to.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Thanks for the shoutout! And yes, that site is so great!