#finished Ben Lerner’s TRANSCRIPTION

Really nice interview series w/ downtown NYC poets c. 1966.

#finished Tove Ditlevsen’s DEPENDENCY

#finished Tove Ditlevsen’s YOUTH.

I can’t seem to smell good today

#Finished CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

#Finished Marios Chakkas’s THE COMMUNE (Inpatient Press, 2024), which is unrelentingly bleak and devilishly funny. Like this year’s Sirāt and The Secret Agent, it captures the doomed, absurd logic of fascist censure (except it’s nonfiction—sort of).

There are so few things I think should be illegal but the Dodgers / Yankees split ballcap is one of them.

Also #finished Michael Martin Shea’s I’M SORRY BUT NONE OF THIS IS MY FAULT (Essay Press).

AWP Amtrak reading. #finished Sentiment by Kai Ihns (blush lit / illicit zines). Hugely liked.

#Finished Bob Glück’s JACK THE MODERNIST (NYRB Classics reissue). The prose hefts the paratactic pleasures of contemporary poetry and LANGUAGE-adjacent compositional tactics in a tender, campy, porny, gossipy love letter that will make you cry yourself into existence. (If you don’t, just give up).

Tonight #finished Thomas Bernhard’s WOODCUTTERS and truly I can say that I enjoyed every word of it.

Not sure what compelled me but just #finished A Confederacy of Dunces

Tonight finally sat down with, started and #finished Terrence Arjoon’s THE DISINHERITED. He really did it. Best book of 2025.

#finished & loved Cedar Sigo’s SIREN OF ATLANTIS. “I want the most satanic podium for others to decipher, line upon line.” Was happy to revisit “A Scandal in Peril,” which I had the pleasure of publishing as Brooklyn Review poetry editor in ‘22.

Just #finished and deeply enjoyed Larry Levis’s WINTER STARS, reissued this month by Pitt Poetry

There needs to be a clothing store for 34 year old septuagenarians

TODAY. FOLEY SQUARE. 2 P.M.

How to Hide from Machines - DIS Magazine The perilous glamour of life under surveillance.

Good moment to revisit this all-timer

A giant whose poetry would reward the attention of many lifetimes. Grateful to Mei-mei for the gift of her writing.

Finally #finished Jenny Erpenbeck’s VISITATION. Not sure what took me so long. I found it lovely & unnerving, sometimes a little heavy handed and the dolorous tone can be grating, but it takes a big swing. Nice example of archives mania in contemporary fiction.

This AM finished Kenneth Koch’s KO: A Season on Earth. Weird one! A postmodern, rhyming, Americana epic. Not particularly good, but points for its total submission to a whimsy that occasionally charms. Demerits for its tonal inscrutability and unneeded luridness.

Tonight #finished Gay Heaven is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax (Archways Editions 2024) by charles theonia

This weekend #finished Coteries and Gossip by David Trinidad and My First Visit to the University of Maine by Jennifer Moxley (The Lettered Streets Press Split Series vol. 4) and The Blackbird by Christian Schlegel (Beautiful Days Press)

#finished de Chirico’s MR. DUDRON trans. Stefania Heim. I laughed a lot and will never forget this description of overcooked pasta: “The insipidness of that boiled white mass surpassed all that can be imagined.”

Out of the frying pan (former neighbor had roaches) into the fire (new neighbor has modular synthesizers).

Just #finished MOTHERHOOD by Sheila Heti. I read it slowly starting in October, with a few breaks to finish other things (I also misplaced it briefly). Will this book about love’s many registers stay with me forever? Yes.

#Finished Anna Biller’s Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso).

Just #finished & enjoyed Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway 2025). What if Alice was a bookworld precariat and Wonderland was given a Kmart realist remodel. “It was like the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and never stopped.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.