Our next recommendation has been unlocked! Here’s Managing Editor Alicia Wright’s fiction recommendation—what will her nonfiction favorite be? Donate any amount at 1dayforiowa.org/tir26 by midnight to find out—! #1DayforIowa
Your #1DayForIowa donations have real impact. Through your generosity, we can train more undergraduate interns and ensure that we can meet the rising costs of production. Thank you to all who’ve given so far today—less than 8 hours to go before they shut down the giving page at 1dayforiowa.org/tir26
Our #1DayForIowa donations are rolling in! Thank you to all our donors so far! Here’s a recommendation from our Managing Editor, Alicia Wright. Head to 1dayforiowa.org/tir26 to give to our campaign and unlock her other two favorites!
Happy #1DayForIowa! Staff will share a book recommendation for each donor to TIR via the University of Iowa's annual giving day.
1dayforiowa/org/tir26
Take my money/idea: Someone should write the screenplay and cast Adam Driver as John Donne in an A24 style Shakespeare in Love type situation
Saturday!
I had the opportunity to talk out (one might call it mouthing off, but demurely) my thoughts about my book and the literature of the U.S. South, and to open up (a little) about my poetics, writing process, and politics in response to these generous questions from Shane Chase of The Brooklyn Review.
The answer is almost certainly graceful nothing/silence, but the situation does bother me!
The ouroborus of conflict avoidance and absenteeism that afflicts a certain generational stripe of cultural worker
Annulet returns with Issue (9) and (10), a double decker that features the first iteration of our open folio "American Poetry & Poetics, 2008–2025." So much is here for you to read. We're so happy to be back.
Thanks to @aliciawright.bsky.social for placing four of my poems in a stunning double-issue of @annulet.bsky.social that includes some of my favorite poets' poems as well as my favorite poets' writing on other poets.
Join us tonight at 7 pm for a reading by Jake Fournier and conversation with @aliciawright.bsky.social !
Close Reading Is For Everyone Dan Sinykin and Johanna Winant Call for Pitches Based on our previous Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century, we are at work on a new version that’s shorter, slimmer, and aimed at a more general audience. We’re looking for a new set of contributors who would write excellent, brief, model close readings of texts that high schoolers might know and care about. Think: “The Gettysburg Address,” Macbeth, and Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” but also song lyrics, idioms, or even a visual image. What is your best, most instructive, most exciting, most welcoming example of how a close reading builds a real argument out from a tiny, perhaps overlooked detail? If you’re interested in pitching us, please send us your 250-word close reading of the text you propose. Your close reading should be mappable using our vocabulary of close reading: the five steps of scene setting, noticing, local claiming, regional argumentation, and global theorizing. (Our close reading of “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the early pages of our introduction is the sort of thing we’re seeking.) If we think we can use yours, we’ll ask you to expand it to a 1,200 word essay in which you explain how your close reading works step by step. We seek close readings both of texts that are canonical and also ones that aren’t. And so we invite contributors both from the discipline of literary studies, and other disciplines across the university, and the public humanities beyond it. Send your pitches—please include your name and contact info—to daniel.sinykin@emory.edu and jwinant@reed.edu by March 15.
CALL FOR PITCHES
@dan-sinnamon.bsky.social and I are at work on a new version of Close Reading for the Twenty-First Century aimed at a more general audience.
We’re looking for new contributions: your model close readings of texts, canonical and not, from literary studies and not.
Details below!
Line chart from 2006-2023 revealing the relative declines of Flood Editions, Ugly Duckling, and Ahsahta, the mixed successes of Black Lawrence, and the meteoric rise of The Song Cave.
My GA and I compiled all the Small Press Distribution (SPD) Bestseller lists from 2006-2023. Using number of mentions by press, I charted the 'top' five poetry presses of the time period, which reveals the rise and dominance of my grad school cohort Alan Felsenthal's The Song Cave.
No I don't have time who could but yes I will make it all work! This is small press living! In any economy, babes!
Book maybe didn't make any lists, but I have truly been touched by the handful of kind emails about it this fall...a channel of poetry that heretofore I'd only read about, moving to move into
Before I “meet a voice” I personally prefer to “meet the mind” but little did I know how out of vogue this is
This is great. Maybe my favorite critical essay yet about C D Wright, in a cluster of good ones! @jenssread.bsky.social @post45.bsky.social post45.org/2025/11/cd-w...
Thanks to @aliciawright.bsky.social for all her hard work in getting this cluster together! What a joy to get to work with you!
And thanks @franciscondine.bsky.social for all your editorial & technical work! The cluster looks beautiful!
@atpost45.bsky.social
post45.org/2025/11/c-d-...
In her introduction, @aliciawright.bsky.social lays out the layers and constellations of influence, relation, and commonalities that shape the cluster’s engagements with C.D. Wright’s poetry, teaching, & thinking. post45.org/2025/11/intr...
Ed. @aliciawright.bsky.social, fr. Carolyn Bergonzo, @amishtrivedi.bsky.social, Annie Bolotin, @notquitehydepark.bsky.social, @dr-b-i.bsky.social, @cspaide.bsky.social, @kellyrosehoffer.bsky.social, Olivia Milroy Evans, @flannelkate.bsky.social, @rvtrousdale.bsky.social, & @jenssread.bsky.social ! 🌟
✒️ 📔 Today's the day of our C.D. Wright cluster!
Ed. @aliciawright.bsky.social
ft. 11 contributors—the list is too long to fit into a single post! But you're in luck, bc the thread below tells the tale of this exceptional homage for an exceptionally talented poet!
post45.org/contemporaries
Red tree flowers with frost and twigs
The late, great CD Wright is going to be honored at Post45 Contemporaries with an incredible, moving, expansive cluster of essays edited by @aliciawright.bsky.social . We are SO excited for this cluster, and we’ll be debuting it this week. Stay tuned for these pieces!
TIR is a forever sweet spot
Heath Ledger the canary in our edgelord hellscape coal mine
Out of a somewhat fugitive magazine called Luigi Ten Co, edited by Whit Griffin and Michael Klausman, two early poems by Ronald Johnson, “sent [by the twenty-four year old] to Louis Zukofsky in early 1959 to which he generously responded with commentary and encouragement.” Uncollected in the works?
This is so wild
Yes! I’m the editor of Annulet. It was a little overzealous of them to delist but yes, Annulet’s next issue is coming out soon.
The exemplary infantilization form: the reality show (particularly of alcoholic southerners screaming at and ogling each other) like millennial dolls in a dollhouse
World-building obsession as a symptom of repressed imperial drive, it’s all they have