B////////////////OOKS&ETC READ. / Batool Abu Akleen, 48kg, Translated from the Arabic by the poet, with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti & Yasmin Zaher (Tenement Press 2025). Refaat Alareer’s posthumous If I Must Die (OR Books 2024) contained poems written during the genocide. This book, by the 20 year old, Akleen represents, as far as I understand, the first book of poems translated into English by someone living through Israel’s accelerated genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Read it. Read it. & act. & act. & act. That it exists is itself remarkable—an act of resistance in the face of decades of attempts to destroy Palestinian culture, the attempts to silence the voices of Palestinians in Gaza. (That none of these books have come from major publishers of U.S. poetry is another story…) The 48 poems are multifaceted. They describe the material horrors of bombings and fragmented bodies but resist, also (or reconfigure) the reduction of people to the mere anonymized flesh that is served up to Western audiences, as the speaker recognizes in children their father’s faces; in a stranger’s striped shirt she is reminded of her father; a severed hand calls out to her person and “asks a lost eye to cry for her.” There is a frequent drive to make a shattered world cohere, to recognize a world marked by Israeli violence and to find in it a community, relations. Many poems, short, willfully abrupt, perhaps, are plaintive, anguished. From a twenty year old, they register the loss of and intense desire for a childhood in which this phase of the genocide would be unthinkable; these poems gain a searing edge in light of a series of poems that metaphorize death as a baby the speaker is giving birth to, a suitor she waits for, a man throwing a profane party. It is hard to read this book and not feel shocked again by the total moral collapse of the west, to not feel anger and sorrow and anger again. And to not have to sit with questions about what to do that demand more precise answers. ####| ||||||||| |||||||||||| ||||||||||||||||||||#|#|##|#|#|#|#|#|#|# Shane McCrae, The World Is Wild and Sad [Chapbook] (Theaphora, New York, 2022) A claustrophobic lyric; classicist-tinged form; not my usual but how could a seventeenth-century scholar not enjoy this? “Some work I left undone, angers, the sea / That will not get a mention of my stone / Some work. Rattles its chain, loved and alone.” I keep wondering how this came into my hands. I really don’t know. Though Theaphora press is set up like a retro game console. ^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^, ^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^,^, A postcard by Buck Downs that begins “one man’s tragedy / isn’t really much / of a tale–” / He’s having fun. I’ve been getting these postcards for, what, ten years? Maybe more. KH told me a story about Buck Downs initially putting poems on Chinese food takeout containers and mailing those out. But it didn’t work out. Too expensive? High return rate? I can’t remember. But I was really shaken by the news of Mel Nichol’s death. Mel was a razor sharp, riotous poet working spaces all her own in conjunction with the lively D.C. Language scene (which more work needs to be done on). I loved hearing her read. It was going to be funny (and totally complex) and strange and challenging. She wasn’t someone who dutifully read her poems. Hell no. They were alive in each other. You never knew what was going to happen. A terrible loss. K. Silem Mohammad’s memories of Mel lodged with the Poetry Foundation.

/// //////// ///////////\\\\\\\\ \\\\\\\\ \\\\\\\\\\\\\ \\\\\\\\\\ \\\\///// Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (New York, 1972). Pulp disaster fiction in which a biodegradable plastic spawns the evolution of plastic-eating bacteria and a London, in which everything is bound to everything else by polymers (we’re, as Orchid Tierney notes, petronauts) spirals into chaos. Plane crashes. Trolley crashes. Melting kitchens. Picked up on a whim from Fitz’s big books sale. I came here for the nature-culture molecular drama and got it—the narrative eye beginning in the guts of aviation hardware, the wiring of a computer regulating traffic flows, cheap flooring of working class housing then working its way outward as plastics disintegrate and systems shut down—airports, subways, households. Bonus, for me, was the narrative of decent into London’s palimpsest of subway tunnels, drainage, sewer mains and climactic scene where the MC reaches down into a river of bacteria sludge to arrive at the knowledge he needs to set everything right. It’s got big, cheesy disaster flick energy with surreal touches and a heavy, awful dose of casual misogyny. And what does it do with all these anxieties over proliferating chemical inventions deranging the nature-culture relation? A seeming cautionary tale against biodegradable plastics? A meeting of the corporate board scene in which the company that almost caused civilizational collapse sees one scientist-capitalist-board member oust another engineer-capitalist-board member promising to use the company’s power RESPONSIBLY. An early anticipation of the capitalist death loop we’re in! Kill me. ****** ******** ************!!!********************************************************************** Okay, Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives (1998, Translated 2007) Samuel Delany book club is trying to fill a Samuel Delany sized hole in our hearts with another novelist. M’s criteria is that the author be a good sentence writer. There’s lots to say about this detective story through a spiraling array of POVs without much time to say it. But perhaps the best poets are those we have to imagine because they retreated from the game of building their own reputation as a poet by retreating outside of the society of poets, somewhere else. Arturo Bolaño, Cesárea Tinajero, the modernist novel about a poetry scene in which the poets seek to locate an obscure modernist poet, all loosely modeled off the actual Infrarealist poets Bolaño was a part of. What a hall of egoic mirrors. I don’t know if we’ll stick with Bolaño. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + careenings by Tim McPeek (black monk press, n.d.) Graceful elegy for Marten Clibbens, a British poet who came to Buffalo in the 80s to study with Robert Creeley and stayed: “oceans drawn / from trenches self-inflicted / for life at such depth / monstrous miniscule luminously blind.” I feel like Buffalo may lead the U.S. cities in staggeringly erudite poet living very private lives per capita. ###################### # ################################################ Thomas Ha, Uncertain Sons and Other Stories (Undertow, Pickering, ON, 2025). ‘Weird Fiction.’ Picked this up at Evening House Books after finding out J there was interested in it and so was C. I hate to make Samuel Delany my omni genre fiction explainer and say it again: but, yeah, I’m fascinated by this book because its stories seem to so quickly move between quasi-fascist and non-fascist ontologies for his settings (SD notes that this is endemic in SF). It’s not realism and this isn’t any determination of Ha’s politics; he’s confronting us with these alternate worlds; we react. His themes are persistent: anxious the borders of the home, father-son relationships, copying/mimesis (“The Mub”; “Alabama Circus Punk” – both stories you could read as about ‘AI’), monstrous others, and social collapse. On one page “Window Boy,” there is no outside to the brutal war of all against all that gives rise to violent authoritarianism (along multiple axes) and lethal borders; on another page, there is. It’s troubling, particularly in a moment where real world capitalist-fascists are so invested in elaborating visions of the future from Christian fascist apocalypticism [the machine needs blood & soil & water!] (Theil) to the eugenicist, white supremacist futurism of Elon Musk. Well, this is at least where I am now with my analysis. Write me a check so large I don’t have to work, and I can guarantee I’ll come back to it. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////// Sarah Sgro, If the Future is a Fetish (YesYes Books, 2019) Very good.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~ Samuel Solomon, “Offsetting Queer Literary Labor,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 24, Numbers 2-3, June 2018, pp. 238-266. Contextualizes poet and socialist-feminist activist Karen Brodine’s typesetting work within gendered regimes of printing labor. A few: “Brodine never wanted to abandon the feminized waged workplace as a site for feminist struggle….she raged at the economic and racial privileges of those feminist writers who argued that the workplace was a masculine domain from which women should remove themslves”; In “Woman Sitting at the Machine Thinking”: “Thinking is not a collective escape from but a communist elaboration of feminized labor.” ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ David Grundy, “‘A Gay Presence’: Publication and Revision in ‘Behind the State Capitol’ by John Wieners.” Puts Wieners’ BSC, the book that sunk Wieners’ reputation, in context of radical queer activism and Wieners working-class sensibilities. Wieners wrote against his psychiatric institutionalization; part of Grundy’s investigation here is how early reception of this book, in a way, re-institutionalizes and depoliticizes Wieners innovative text. If only a fraction of this context had made its way to the Wieners selected….Anyway, damn this empire, damn this spasmodic registration.