Friday Links: Nature Rocks Edition
"Itself living? Teach me how / To consider the lilies; all they are / Because of, all they are despite." - Ariana Benson, "Love Poem in the Black Field"
The gardens are blooming, homies. That pumpkin plant? It’s getting bigger. We also have some hibiscus cropping up, my friend and neighbor’s rooftop garden is popping, the kid planted ~~~something~~~ in a pot he painted at summer camp as gift for his mom (I got a bracelet and it rocks, you can’t see through the blog, but I’m Bracelet Guy)—July rules, dudes.
What I’ve Been Reading This Week:
Poems! Lots of poems. Reading two books a week was a way of trying to regularly incorporate poetry into my reading practice. Since poetry collections are shorter than novels, if I can help it, I’ll be on a three long books/three poems schedule each month. We got some great ones this week. I’m talking, of course, about Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, Gatherer by Todd Osborne, and Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky.
Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson: I never do this, but I would put this book down because I didn’t want it to end. In fact, it’s the first book I started and the last I finished. Ariana’s poems are spellbinding, and not just because I love nature poems. She reminds me of Dan Beachy-Quick, in the sense that I feel like these poems are trying to get at something sacred. But don’t take this for some gentle, weak-and-grass-stained-kneed, we’re-all-having-a-picnic poetics. She also reminds me of Nina Simone. Reading this book, you need to remember the significance of the boll weevil. You need to know about the Great Dismal Swamp (an inspiration for parts of Vine). You need to reckon with “why don’t I associate more Black poets with the pastoral tradition?” You need, of course, to reckon with this country’s history. But you will have these lyrical, gorgeous poems carrying you, and it will be an experience when you read this book. Especially when you get to “Still Life with Bouquet, Golden Spade (out of frame),” my favorite poem in the collection with a title too long for the epigraph. Here’s a bonus epigraph, I think you’ll see who she’s writing after: “be bloodied as thorns, we be blushed as trumpet / lily, as Damask rose. things of beauty—we. / we the bolls survived the gin, we the clouds / in our own sky, the birds too. we be dandelion, / be red jasmine, be jazz. we flush”
Gatherer by Todd Osborne: shoutout to southern poets! I was lucky enough to meet Todd at AWP, when I was talking to the homie Casie Dodd at the
table. Like me, Todd’s originally from the suburbs of Middle Tennessee (doesn’t quite ring out like the slums of Shaolin, does it?), and like me, Todd has a real appreciation for the natural beauty of that area. There’s also a lot of radical tenderness (shoutout my beloved ) in this book, a lot of wrestling with how best to be a good person. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but if my recommendation isn’t enough, it was blurbed by hero of this blog Adam Clay, so.Lake Michigan by Daniel Borzutzky: “I am vehemently protective of my native city…” begins Patricia Smith’s blurb of this book, presumably because the publishers wouldn’t let her simply say “first of all, shut the fuck up about Chicago.” This is a book that deals with my city’s legendary violence. Not in the racist, concern-trolling, “why don’t those people in those neighborhoods stop shooting each other?” No, this book is absolutely a product of the Daley/Jon Burge era and the Emanuel/Jason Van Dyke era. This is a city of police violence of mythic proportions, and Borzutzky takes aim squarely at the Ravenswood-dwelling mayor and the Lakefront Liberals who enabled him. Borzutzky is playing in the tradition of Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Raúl Zurita, and yes, Gwendolyn Brooks. In the beginning, we see some protesters surrounding the mayor’s house—meant to evoke the protests of Laquan McDonald’s murder—and then the protesters are rounded up and taken to the beach, where they are held indefinitely, murdered over and over again, brainwashed, given hard labor, and all sorts of surrealism- and negritude-inspired horrors are multiplied until the language on the page accurately reflects the beatdown the living under neoliberalism and capitalism. It’s been a while since I’ve read Césaire, but the influence was immediate, unmistakeable, and genuinely rattling when applied to the context in which I live. This is a frightening, but maybe necessary, collection to read while thinking about Project 2025. I’ll be returning to this soon, maybe in conjunction with Zurita’s Song For His Disappeared Love, a book I really adore that I didn’t realize Borzutzky translated.
LINKS!
A new publication in Scientific Reports shows that researchers at Chubu University have discovered five new species of bioluminescent snails in Thailand. Worth remembering, in the midst of the sixth mass extinction, that there is still a lot of this planet to learn about.
Hey, did you know that large birds can help carbon-hungry forests? Suzana Camargo in Mongabay reports on a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change about how fruit-eating birds—those toucans on your cereal box?—can aid in reforestation efforts. As with any good nature news, this comes with a huge HOWEVER—deforestation will, of course, I mean I don’t have to explain how deforestation prevents birds from doing zoochory, right?
Maybe I have to explain what zoochory is, since it’s a word I just learned. It’s animal-driven seed dispersal. Here’s an explainer from Mongabay.
Zito Madu in Plough with a great read on hummingbirds. Love a hummingbird! Did you know that the amount of different colors hummingbirds’ plumage can be exceeds the known diversity of colors of all other bird species combined? It’s true. Click through for the Mayan creation story of the hummingbird, too.
Of all places, Forbes—yes, FORBES—is writing about how AI is depleting what they call “our scarecest natural resource, water.” The writer, Cindy Gordon, is a CEO who works in AI, so her solutions are bullshit—call for CEOs to “reflect.” A real writer at a real magazine (or blog, idk), what say what really needs to happen, which is that AI needs to be destroyed, and probably a lot of our other tech, too, and everyone should go read some
.
What’re you still doing here? Take a walk. By a body of water if you can help it. To a beer garden if you feel like it. To a regular garden. Take a walk!
If you work in the service industry, may you clean up in tips this weekend. If you like when you section includes that outside tables, I hope that happens for you. If you don’t like serving the outside tables, I hope you get the section closest to the AC.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
Thanks so much for shouting out Todd's book, Chris!