Reading Mary Ruefle and Matthea Harvey is changing the way that I see what a poem can do. I loved roaming through Ruefle’s Selected Poems and I’m excited to read her essay collection Madness, Rack, and Honey. I found Matthea Harvey’s Modern Life unnerving and at times howlingly funny (the first line of the first poem: “The ham flowers have veins and are rimmed in rind, each petal a little meat sunset”). Her loosely abecedarian sequences “The Future of Terror” and “Terror of the Future” rocked my world with their formal constraints and eerie visions of subjugation.
I devoured the new Netflix show Orange is the New Black in 48 hours. Finally, a show created by a woman about female friendship featuring women of color, lesbians, disadvantaged women, and a token artisanal soap entrepreneur—and it’s a hit! It’s wildly entertaining and thought-provoking, combining startling moments of joy with real talk about how America treats its prisoners. I’m also digging the latest season of Project Runway for adding more Tim Gunn and unconventional materials challenges. I’ve been with the show since the beginning and have found that much of the runway critique applies to a workshop poem: Does it look well made? Is it familiar (and therefore boring and safe)? How are the lines working to create form? How does it relate to what’s happening now and what’s been done before? Highlights from this season so far: Helen’s Bilbao sombrero dress, Dom’s stripetastic bowtie sheath dress, Bradon’s everything, and Karen’s “futuristic Great Gatsby” dress bedazzled with black rice, coconut shavings, and glitter. I’m rooting for Dom to take it all.
It was a dark summer in Ohio so I mixed the 90s R&B jams of my youth with Jessie Ware and Geographer. Ware’s debut album Devotion is an intoxicating mélange of 90s big-beat dance, nocturnal Aaliyah grooves, 80s Whitney, and a healthy dose of Sade. She’s got that retro-modern thing going on. She recently paid tribute to two monster dance hits with the xx in a live mash-up of Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You” and Modjo’s “Lady (Give Me Tonight)” and it was everything that I love. Geographer is a San Francisco-based indie band that remains at the top of my playlist. Vocalist Mike Deni and his two Berklee-trained bandmates make magic using synthesizers, cello, and guitar and the result is gorgeously vulnerable music that can be stripped down or built up. I’m psyched to see them on tour and encourage people to check them out. Their latest album, Myth, is great, but their Animal Shapes EP is something special.