view from my room, overlooking the lawn at Weymouth Center for the Arts & Humanities

I am astounded by how much rest I need after a weary semester of teaching two Eng 112 classes on top of my normal work hours, fighting an English department’s compulsory AI use (anyone want some AI-generated sample essays in your course materials?!), publishing seven spring books at River River Books and bookselling at AWP, while parenting a tween and a teen and navigating relationships and small business taxes and—yes. All of it.

Conversation with my partner yesterday:

“I have been so exhausted.”

“It’s always like this for you, your first few days. You need to unwind.”

The first full day of my residency was also the first day of my cycle, and the gift of only caring for my body on this day was just—oh, indescribable. I took naps. I read in bed. I took long walks in the pine woods. I ate half a melon on the veranda while reading more poems (Susan Briante’s new and selected 13 Questions for the Next Economy, rob mclennan’s The Sentence of the Book, Rest is Resistance—SO. GOOD! Also Sei Shōnagan’s The Pillow Book in the evening, and some Hildegard von Bingen while making coffee in the morning—variety is life!). I watched Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson (2016) in the evening while drinking wine in bed. I watched 12 deer in the evening field. I tried to write, and oh, it was not happening—the essay I planned on working on, the poem notebook. “The best thing you can do for your writing is something else,” I reminded myself. My first night, I started reading Charles Wright’s large collected (not complete) Oblivion Banjo, which daringly opens with “Homage to Ezra Pound.” I took a walk in the pine woods and was drenched by a downpour, despite the weather saying it wouldn’t rain—don’t trust technology. “The rain waters the beans, and it waters me, too,” writes Thoreau in his journal. I think of this line all the time. I didn’t even take a shower that evening, I was so soaked and washed by the rain. It felt a little like a baptism into the woods and rest.

I’m astonished at how empty I am—how much I need to fill back up. Truly, our bodies are not factories, but flesh and blood and soul.

My wish for you this week: naps. Do nothing time. Reading time. Resistance to grind and hustle and productivity. Unproductiveness. Saying no. Taking time for yourself and not feeling guilty about it. Saying no. Did I mention saying no? Who isn’t a recovering people-pleaser! I wish REST for you, in all the increments possible.

Paterson (2016) with Adam Driver

12 white-tailed deer, ears raised, watching me to move on so they could come back out of the woods and graze in the field

flowers I’ve photographed in the longleaf pinewoods this week, to look up:

purpledisk sunflower, which looks an awful lot like a cosmos

plaintain pussytoes. this is why we look plants up. what a name!

AH NETTLE! I didn’t recognize the flower portion! This is why we look up before we touch, haha. Thankfully I did not touch.

Hello, poetry friends. What a whirl this fall has been. I’m writing to let you know of two events—one in-person event THIS WEEK: Weave & Spin in Hillsborough at Eno House, where I’m reading with Jameela F. Dallis, author of Encounters for the Living and the Dead! 7-9, with open mic to follow. Hope to see you there!

And a CHAPBOOK READING with four dear friends on December 7 at 7pmET that I’m so excited about! I’m including the zoom link here, and feel free to share it privately/via text or email or DMS, but please don’t share publicly for safety reasons!

You’re invited to A Winter’s Night Chapbook Reading.

Join the reading:

https://duke.zoom.us/j/93016786196

I just finished proofing some poems (a poem in the Jan/Feb issue of Poetry, two in Sugar House Review) and an essay called “The Unfenced Field and Poetry” (forthcoming in Third Coast), and winter is so in the air here in North Carolina. I’ve been binge-reading Susan Howe after reading her gorgeous new Penitential Cries (so. good.) as well as 100 Years of Solitude, and feeling surrounded by good books, if nothing else.

Hope y’all stay well & warm. ❤️ 

Han

an aerial photograph of my family’s pond from Google maps

I have a new essay out today in the This Be the Place series at Poetry Foundation, edited by Jeremy Lybarger. I wrote about the solace (and abandonment) of the pond I grew up beside on my family’s ten acres in Virginia—along with C.D. Wright, Linda Gregg, a little Agnes Varda, et al—and you can read it here: “A Several-Acre Space of Tenderness.”

The end of the essay references Larks, so for readers of Larks, I hope it deepens the landscape of the poems, and for those who haven’t read Larks, maybe this will encourage you to pick up a copy at your library or bookstore.

Hope you are resting and caring for yourselves and each other as best you can during this long summer,

Han

Hi, friends!

I have been thinking about offering this workshop for sometime, after spending the last decade writing through different forms of historical & family trauma, violence, and healing. I am not a therapist, and the framing of this workshop comes from being a writer and approaching difficult narratives from a writer’s perspective: how do we give shape to trauma narratives, to unwieldy family stories, to personal accounts? How do we deal with memory gaps, empty spaces, lack of documents, family silences, linguistic disruption and failure? Conversely, how do we approach an abundance of material, an overwhelm of information? A box of letters we can barely stand to look at? Confederate roll calls? Court documents? I’ll be walking us through some practical, formal approaches to writing these narratives that have aided me, and also drawing from the community of books I’ve read in my own healing and processing journey (always ongoing), such as What My Bones Know by Stephanie Foo, Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing by Jen Soriano, but also documentary poetic work such as Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip, Defacing the Monument by Susan Briante, Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead, and Denise Levertov’s The Poet in the World. Touchstone poetic texts will include Jenny George’s The Dream of Reason, in case you are someone who wants to read ahead of time.

Participants will receive an inclusive reading packet as well as several writing prompts, and feedback from me on a selection of poems up to 15 pages.

I’m offering these workshops in part to raise funds for my press, River River Books, and in part because I’ve wanted to offer this workshop for some time. I’m asking for a $100 donation, which you can make here, but also: I want you to be there if you want to be there, don’t worry about the money.

Email riverriverbooksevents@gmail.com and let me know what date you’d like a spot saved.

• When: Two dates, both Saturdays in July: 5 & 19, choose your day.

• How long: Two hours, 9-11am ET

• Where: On Zoom!

• How much: $100 suggested donation.

I can’t wait to talk and write with you!

Respond to me with any questions you have.

Hope your summers are beginning to flower.

Han

So, birthday week (!!) surprise is that my chapbook, Hawk & Moon, found a wonderful home at Bottlecap Press—so like me, she’s a Taurus—and what better time to drop the page link then during the full Flower Moon. Hawk & Moon was a finalist at Glass Poetry, and I’ve been looking for the right press home for this project because it is its own orbit of hawks in the pines above my house, desire, summer berries, anger and anxiety, porchlight poetics, and all things moon phases and lovesong. Who doesn’t need MORE ars poeticas in their life? More full moon haiku? Bottlecap Press has a buy-two-get-one-free coupon (use code BTGO), and I cannot recommend Catherine Rockwood’s brand new chapbook DOGWITCH and We’ll Miss the Stars in the Morning by Lee Potts highly enough. I promise you, you will thank me. Three books for $20 is a full-moon bargain!

Scroll down for a peek/poem from inside Hawk & Moon—the collection contains some longer poems as well as shorter poems, and it opens with one of my very favorite love poems to read right now: “Ars Poetica with a Bike in the Woods.”

Since it is my birthday week: please write love poems. Please care for yourself. Please do something that wholly delights you. Please say no, and let it feel right. Please say yes, and let it feel good. Please take a beautiful walk. Please eat something delicious. Please do something that has been bothering you that you’ve put off for too long, and then reward yourself (cough, me every week!).

Also, for the local Durham folks, I’m reading from Larks at Flyleaf books on May 18 (my actual birthday!) 2:30-4pm, with the poet Adrian Rice. Hope to see you there!

Wishing you the best full moon celebration and many flowers,

(Also! should you like a review copy of Hawk & Moon, let me know),

Love,

Han

Hi dear ones. I know we’re all kind of swarmed by pollen, by pests of all kind, by end of the semester…I wanted to share some cool features before my brain uncollects for the semester and lapses into North Carolina Summer Mode+With Children:

Andy Fogle interviewed me for Salvation South, and did such an amazing job with this longform interview—we talk Southern denialism, the limit of guilt and shame, the call and response of literature, anger versus the truest emotion, and more.

Salvation South also ran six new poems of mine, including four new Ars Poeticas (yes, I’ve been writing a lot of these for an Ars | Ours project), and two new love poems.

And! There’s a new episode of Painted Bride Quarterly’s podcast Slush Pile, featuring three of my poems, and the editors’ live process of discussing the poems and selecting them for publication. It is a VERY generous discussion, and left me feeling rather abashed and seen and like my cup had been filled all the way up to the very brim, so if you ever receive a request to be featured on the Slush Pile, I hope you say yes without trepidation (and considerably less anxiety than I did, ha). It was really beautiful to hear my poems read by others, and talked through. Such care and generosity, and I learned a lot about my own work in the process. So many thank yous to Marion Wrenn, Kathleen Volk Miller, Jason Schneiderman, Divina Boko, Lisa Zerkle, Dagne Forrest, and Lillie Volpe.

Editors discuss poems “Ars Poetica with a Broken Bucket,” “I Am Cultivating My Field of No’s,” and “Partial Listing of My Jealousies”

Also! A New episode of Of Poetry this week (Episode 70!) with the wonderful Danika Stegeman, and this episode is gorgeous, and heals my heart in several ways, formally and informally. Listen to Episode 70: Of Relentlessness, Gendered Maximalism, and Harryette Mullen and the Mirrored Cinquain, here.

I’m really excited for the Of Poetry episodes in the editing hopper right now—an abundance of community riches, y’all. America is unwell, but poetry is thriving and community care lives. Peep the forthcoming guests below!

LASTLY! My online journal Moist Poetry Journal is open to submissions on a SUMMER RIOT theme (if you catch the self-serving reference to my May birthday from the above ars poetica excerpt, congrats you clever reader, you <3). Look, some of these subs are getting a 24-hour response, but you only heard that here, I am NOT posting that online, I will not anger the poetry gods or Three Penny Review that way. But do send us something lovely, fiery, mad, loving, explosive, tender, sweet:

And don’t forget that River River Books opens May 1 to full-length poetry manuscripts.

Validation is community work. Love to you all.

Han

Yes, I’ve had a crush on Jane Kenyon for the past few months—this autumn, this winter, this spring. I love the following lecture notes (from A Hundred White Daffodils)—a precious document, to have something unfinished from a mind you love. I can’t love the line “We have to be like babies waking up” MORE, my word. Like, stop trying to be sophisticated. Try to be more like babies, like fools for the world, like simpletons—as though you are hearing, seeing, paying attention for the first time.

If you are looking for a writing exercise today, try writing your own Everything I Know About Writing Poetry (Notes for a Lecture/A Diary Entry/A Homily for Birds).

Everything I know about writing poetry…

• I am able to write when I have been able to feed myself, rest, read good books, see beautiful things, spend time outside, live my life among others, be gently busy and occupied but not overwhelmingly, distressingly busy.

• Sometimes a line comes singing into my head. What a gift. “The light has always been going down” began this way with the opening line “What. The quiet work of words.” appearing on the way back from dropping my kids off at school. Other time it is an image that triggers a poem, something I saw. Other times, it is the space I make for the writing of the poem that triggers the poem: sitting down on the couch with my dog, sitting down with my student in a sterile, grey study room on a tired, Friday afternoon, and a poem blooms out.

• Revision is play. It can be a joy (the revision of line endings, for me, especially). It can also be what bothers you; listen for what nettles you in a poem—a word that feels too easy, too expected, too rushed.

• Like love, writing poetry can’t be forced. But you can create the conditions for it. You can soften yourself towards writing, take care of yourself, relax, feed yourself, emotionally and physically and spiritually. I do think the best thing you can do for your writing is something else—gardening, sewing, baking. I’m partial to gardening, because change and growth and weather and seasons and planning and color and light are built into it.

• Reading is the most essential aspect of writing.

• The best writing risks something. Writing poetry should continually move you towards your edge, not towards your center, not towards safety and what you know, but towards your not-knowing, your uncertainty, your confession.

• Be specific as hell.

• Be concise as the honeysuckle, to borrow this beautiful phrase from poet Chris Corlew.

• Don’t forget the music—how the language sounds. Please don’t forget this. The vowels. The consonants. The consonance, assonance. The rhythms. Intentionally read musical poets like Gerard Manley Hopkins and Gwendolyn Brooks.

• We are not lonely poetry islands. And, unlike Jane Kenyon, most of us do not have the luxury of a rural farmhouse and hours of quiet time. The good news is that we read best in community, with each other—find others to read with, write with, attend readings with, make presses or start a journal or podcast with; this is the joy-work.

Happy National Poetry Month, all.

Han

This post could be a LitHub article—or, I could have developed it into one. But I didn’t want to. I wanted to keep it intimate and small. I did not want it to be for everyone. I did not want it to be wide, to have many applications, to appeal to a great number of readers. Instead, I wanted to share some texts that have particularly carried me, helped me, been a balm and a salve to me as I healed and wrote Larks. Because how do you write trauma? How do you go into some of your darkest times, your deepest wounds, and write? In part, you read. In part, you sit with others who have also suffered. You take your time. You do not rush. You learn to breathe again. Here are three poetry collections that helped me breathe again.

1. The Dream of Reason by Jenny George

Domestic, rural, tender, inhabiting silence in such compassionate and deeply felt ways. I knew the companionship of suffering the second I began to read George’s collection. I wrote a review of George’s collection which was only the third review I had ever written, noting of the above poem “The Dream of Reason’s opening poem, ‘Origins of Violence,’ recounts a narrative of violence and horror with the gentleness of telling a story to a child.” Writing of trauma requires a great tenderness, and you will not find a more tender shepherd of language than Jenny George.

2. Brute by Emily Skaja

Brute Strength

Skaja’s Brute is a collection of escape as well as wildness, which is another path in and through and out of trauma, particularly relational trauma. It does what we need poetry of trauma to do—to make a narrative clear, to ring a bell, to parse the speaker’s tangled history. I love that fierceness and self-acceptance is central to this collection, as is the recovery of the early self, the first self—”where is that witch girl / unafraid of anything,” the speaker asks.

3. A Woman of Property by Robyn Schiff

Fourth of July, 2012

I can’t say much here, except that both Robyn Schiff’s poetry and Schiff’s person as a teacher gave me language centered around the concept of Greek tragedy and kindness —and I needed that kindness most of all. It is rare to meet so brilliant a poet who is also an extremely kind person in their actions, giving of themselves to students who are not well known or privileged. I’m deeply indebted to Schiff, and lines from “Fourth of July, 2012” provide an epigraph to my long poem “Larks,” at the center of Larks.

I hope this encourages you to draw close texts as you write your own books. We don’t write or think in isolation. To be human is, as Heidegger of all people said (!), to be a conversation. We don’t need to write alone, or feel alone. We have a community of books, and each other. And that is something to celebrate, that we have models for our storytelling and articulation.

Wishing you good reading and fortifying of yourselves, this spring.

Han

p.s. I have a short essay and David Lynch-inspired sonnet newly published in Slow Orbit! Read it here.

p.p.s. I’ll be having an official launch for Larks at Letters Bookshop in Durham, NC, on Thursday, March 13, at 6:30pm! Reading with poet and librarian Emilie Menzel! Please come out!

How do you fill it back up?

One way is letting others care for you. This is a special feat for caretakers: to let someone else carry you, be there for you, show up for you. It’s hard whether they offer, or whether you need to ask for care. I cared for a friend this past weekend, driving with them up to Cleveland, Ohio, and in turn, I very much needed my partner to care for me when I returned home to Durham yesterday. On the drive home, I called them as a winter storm whitened the trees and the road, and my anxiety of snow driving needed to be calmed by their voice. When I got home, they had cleaned the house, and my dogs were happy, and they ordered and fed me lunch, and I took a nap while they picked up our kids from school.

So, a list of ways to fill your cup up when you are tired and have loved and given to others, and now need to love and give to yourself—in no particular order at all, because I am tired, and writing this in-between student appointments at work:

• Naps (plural; make them cozy, electric or acoustic blankets, add a cat or dog)

• Telling folks you are at capacity, and need to limit your emotional labor (this is often the area I am most taxed), especially if you have persons in your life prone to dumping/spilling/venting. Bravo, dear one.

• Good food. I’m serious about the protein and water, the tea, the liquids. Eat the things you find delicious and comforting, and also make them good for you. I love salmon—yesterday my love brought me the grilled salmon and eggplant curry noodle bowl I love from the Thai place next to our house. This returns to letting others care for you!

• Throw what you “should” do to the wind, and read something you actually really want to read (Mahmoud Darwish for me, lately), in bed, with that cozy blanket and tea, and segue into: a nap. Ahh, the best kind of reading.

• Watch a really beautiful film. Or something mindless and funny. Something bingeable. Or a gorgeous nature documentary. Delight yourself, I’m saying.

• Make hot chocolate on the stove. The way you will make your kitchen smell is infinitely wonderful, it’s not that much work at all, and it’s delicious and filling and also a sensory distraction: whisking the cocoa and sugar and water into a delicious, chocolately boil, pouring in the milk, bringing it back to heat, adding a little vanilla. Your senses will thank you.

• Hip stretches: resting in pigeon (I love pigeon), or forward folds, or folded butterfly pose

• Bubble baths, which I am going to HIT as soon as I am home today from work and school carlines. Leave your phone outside, take a book of poems or an audiobook you’re super into, and a sparkling water. Soak it out, baby.

• Intimacy: if you know me, you know I’m not shy about talking about intimacy, and part of resting for me is also physical intimacy—with my partner, with myself. Oh, it is good for me. It’s great before a NAP. (Maybe everything on this list ultimately comes back to the nap, haha.)

• Saying no to extra events and after-school events and by being intentional about down-time. This is an area I particularly shine at, since I’m fairly certain I’m part hobbit. Stay inside, avoid that cold rain and Covid/Bird Flu/Norovirus, and rest.

You might have noticed that (some of) these (particularly the core nap recommendation) are ways a parent might care for you—we must parent ourselves, and each other, and also be aware of our limits in parenting and caring. We must rest. I hope you find real rest this week. We need each other because the caretakers cannot give everything all the time. We cannot. Remember that boundaries are for you, not other people. Now go have a cup of tea, and chase that naptime. And rest, as much as you can. Keep a tender “no, not this time,” in your back pocket.

Han

J-T Kelly has written Larks’ first review, and I’m so grateful for J-T’s care and attention in this review…you can read the full review in periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics, edited by rob mclennan.

I also have eight new poems from Larks published in Up the Staircase Quarterly and periodicities and Screen Door Review this week (see links below), and I hope you give them a read and consider preordering a copy of Larks (I’m also happy to visit your class or book group to read/talk poems!). Many thanks to the editors for their support and care—we do not bring books into the world alone.

Swallows, photograph Vladimir Tolman

periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics

• The Lily Crucifix (c1450)

• Swallows

• Bird Song Sounds Out of Tune Only to the Human Ear

Up the Staircase Quarterly

• Artist's Statement in a Mountain Cabin

• Broken

Screen Door Review

• Poem for Split-Level Home and Pleasure

• Brief Catalog of Blue

• Animal Boundaries

Christ on the Lily Crucifix, Godshill Village Parish Church, Isle of Wight

Jane Kenyon, at the Eating of the Pig dinner party in Ann Arbor, 1978

I’ve been continuing my Jane Kenyon deep diving, reading the book Simply Lasting, writers on Jane Kenyon, edited by Joyce Peseroff, who was one of Kenyon’s closest writer friends along with the fiction writer Alice Mattison. I can’t recommend the book enough, whether you are lightly or deeply interested in Jane Kenyon, as it has both a personal recollection section with letters, poems, personal essays, and then a critical essay portion, and in general is so well curated in edited by Kenyon’s intimates. In her own essay, which directly follows Peseroff’s introduction which you should not skip (I won’t spoil the details, but there are some delightful ones there—okay, a teaser: Jane Kenyon discovered house gutters were the perfect shape for baking french bread?!), Alice Mattison describes their small group workshop meetings, which took place three or four times a year:

I love how much food and rest and companionship are included in these meetings. How much intimacy and conversation. Alice describes a workshop that took place immediately after receiving the (much-relatable!) disappointment of an adjunct teaching job rejection (ah, the the amplified slights of academia’s underpaid labors), and helping Jane find a preposition she was happy with in a poem, because Jane did not want to repeat a preposition. Alice offered the preposition “through,” and after some discussion, that pleased Jane: “[…] She wrote down the word with a satisfied flourish. After that first workshop, I took the train home and stepped into Edward’s arms saying ‘I’m healed.’ I’d put behind me the disappointment about the teaching job. I was going to be a writer. The train pulled out and I realized I’d left my wallet on the seat.” This kind of delightful relating is how the personal reflection section IS, so yes, you need this book.

Against my will, I love the Wendell Berry essay “Sweetness Preserved,” although he does peer at Jane Kenyon from without a bit like an art object, as a “beautiful” and “spiritual” poet. The closing paragraph is so beautiful and heartfelt, I forgive him for how the essay necessarily developes, and in fact I think it takes a humble soul to write it as he did. He does some beautiful close reading of both Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon’s poetry in the essay as well, and I definitely recommend you read it.

The Gregory Orr essay “Our Lady of Sorrows” is not to be missed. I’m going to give you a minor feast here of some quotes I loved, especially because what Orr is advocating here, and what we find in Kenyon’s poetry, is going directly against our current administration, against ICE raids, against our profit over people and communities mentality in the United States, and I think it is heartily important to affirm with our students, in our classrooms, with each other, and to ourselves:

Other things I love, love about this book: Donald Hall’s gorgeous essay “Ghost in the House” where he so beautifully and frankly writes about Kenyon’s Bipolar Disorder as well as her joy after sex (her orgasms! how beautiful, this frankness about a woman’s sexuality and desire; how simply it is spoken of), Mike Pride’s interview with Jane as well as his relating of the below anecdote, one of many which highlights Kenyon’s spirit and sense of righteous anger:

Yes, I am delighted by Kenyon’s human-ness, by her desire to be praised (“I want to be praised all the time,” she told Alice Mattison, and isn’t that the poet’s desire? Want to calm a poet down? praise them), her anger when slighted, her despair at the world’s injustice, her lily and peony gardening, her love of her dog Gus, her treasury keeping at her local church, her afternoon lovemaking, her honesty about mental health and depression and medications, her pleasure that her initials were the same as John Keats, her love of fine scarfs and cooking Indian food and earrings and more.

Jane Kenyon and Gus

Kenyon’s poetry, her desire to focus her work on one thing, seems to me to offer real relief from the overcrowded and frantic narrative poem I sometimes read, the crushing, overwhelmed poem that seems to take its tone existentially from our news and social media rather than looking for some kind of stillness balance or ballast in the poet’s own self.

Kenyon said in an interview with Marian Blue (in A Hundred White Daffodils):

To write the lyric—to survive by way of the lyric, and the vulnerability it welcomes into its lines, isn’t that exactly what we need right now?

the Loblolly pines above my house

If you know me, you know I struggle with calendar time, and time (thank you, Covid, and everything else), but I want to take a pause on the cusp of the year, and reflect for a moment on the past year, because each of us—we are not very good at celebrating ourselves, are we? Or, very rarely do I meet someone who does this too well, haha.

In no particular order, and with special thanks for the pines and their light above my home, here are some events from this past year I’d like to note and celebrate:

• Amorak Huey and I took River River Books to AWP for the first time! And we sold enough books to pay for the table. And we had the best time.

• Larks won the Hollis Summers Prize in April, right when I did not expect it at all. What a joyful surprise to receive that phone call from Sarah Green, when I was out having drinks with my beloved on their birthday (!!). So grateful to Chanda Feldman for selecting Larks.

• We accepted four amazing titles from River River’s summer reading period…and then two more in the autumn—bringing our full and forthcoming catalog to twelve titles, each one an absolute gem. This work is so close to my heart, I could not be more proud and excited and grateful for each of our authors, their poetry and their trust. For our incredible designer, Alban Fischer. So much gratittude.

• Amorak and I also took River River to Youngstown Lit Fest in October, and were on an incredible panel with Sara Moore Wagner of Driftwood Press and Lefty Blondie Press and Seven Kitchens Press.

• My work supervisor secured grant funding for me to lead a Friday creative writing workshop for students—free, drop in, come-as-you-are. I work at a community college, so there are layers are gratitude here.

• My essay “Singing in the Outhouse: Frank Stanford, Labor, and Southern Listening,” was published in American Poetry Review

• I published 23 episodes of Of Poetry Podcast this year—pretty good for a volunteer gig, haha—and tomorrow, NEW YEAR’S, I’m dropping EPISODE 64: CAROLYN OLIVER (Of Alcestis, Space and Star Trek, and What Would You Give Up For Love?) So tune in for this wonderful episode and to hear Carolyn read new poems from The Alcestis Machine (Acre Books, 2024).

• My new Sunday evening writing group, with a (largely) nonfiction writing and fiction writing friend, which is a balm I needed, which I very much needed—gratitude to my friend J.D. for organizing and leading this group.

I also had some poetry published, and I’m grateful to these editors, who are incredible writers, readers, and community workers themselves:

Now time to thank the big baddies, which include our couples’ counselor, my therapist, my preventative and acute migraine meds, zoloft, my ridiculous dog with the anxiety the size of a planet, my beautiful kids, the light and the birds.

Sending so much love into your new years. Hang in there, y’all. Take care of yourselves and each other. Get your care lined up now. Retreat when you need to. Ask for help. Walk with fear and trembling and gentleness, fresh notebooks, refilled pens.

Warmly,

Han

Invitatory by Molly Spencer (Parlor Press, 2024)

The Bluest Nude by Ama Codjoe (Milkweed, 2022)

Toska by Alina Pleskova (Deep Vellum, 2023)

For Today by Carolyn Hembree (LSU Press, 2024)

No Spare People by Erin Hoover (Black Lawrence Press, 2023)

Skydog by Jan Beatty (Lefty Blondie Press, 2022)

Ablation by Danika Stegeman (11:11 Press, 2023)

The Alcestis Machine by Carolyn Oliver (Acre Books, 2024)

World’s End, by rob mclennan (ARP Press, 2023)

Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road Press, 2024)

“Writing love poems is anti-fascist.” post from Bluesky

What kind of a love poem? I know that question is immediately on my mind in response. But love itself, as a practice and a concept, is inherently anti-fascist because love is concerned with reality and seeing past the anxious self to the reality of the other person. (Iris Murdoch)

I think of Muriel Rukeyser’s poem “Looking at Each Other,” and how the deep attention present between the two people in the poem constitutes the haven from the (un)rest of the world, the place of solace and reprieve, of comfort and consolation and survival:

I’ve also been deep in Donald Hall in Jane Kenyon lately, thanks to this gorgeous archive of Eating the Pig at the Ann Arbor District Library, an event where a pig dinner was consumed with great revelry, and Donald Hall later wrote a poem about it which, for seven (7) minutes of your time, you can listen to here.

Anyway, I was so taken with these young images of Don and Jane in 1974 in Ann Arbor, photographs by Stephen Blos:

Don with Pig’s Apple, titled “Pig”

Jane Kenyon before Dinner

And I’ve been deep in Hall and Kenyon’s poems for the last week or so, their love poems with and to each other, and Don’s essay of “The Third Thing,” which I find so moving and essential, sometimes losing track of who wrote which lines of love or lust for the other one, and how tenderly they wrote about each other’s hair, each other’s writing, living with each other in rural New Hampshire at Don’s family’s farmhouse, in a living writing retreat together.

Hall and Kenyon’s love story also involves their cancer stories—Don’s colon cancer first, which Kenyon wrote about so movingly, and Kenyon’s briefer experience with Leukemia.

What happens after death, when absence becomes the receiver of the love? The lines that really set me into silence, that struck me so profoundly, as someone who has been deep in writing love poems themselves, are these from Hall—because you think the “you” in the poem will always be with you—you take the lyric “you” for granted, don’t you? So flexible, so capacious. Surely that someone will always be there. But no. No, that is a specific you, as specific as the I we won’t admit is the speaker of the poem:

And now for the poems that are the reason for this post in the first place, ha. In bed last night, turning between editions, as one does, nerdily and in a sort of voraciously demanding way as we can only really be with poets and be satisfied, I saw a poem in Hall’s thick White Apples and the Taste of Stone, Selected Poems 1946-2006, which encompasses poems after Kenyon’s death, and includes poems from The Painted Bed, although interestingly under the different title heading of Throwing Away (such an interesting revision). So here is the version of the poem in “Love Poem” in the 2006 Selected,

And here is the version that appears in the 2011 collection The Painted Bed: 

I think you could do far, far worse than take these two poems and plop them in front of a class of beginner poets, and have them discuss the significant revision—the complete replacement of the pronouns from “you” to “I”—and what it moves so strikingly towards. Because isn’t the best revision always towards vulnerability of some kind—be that music or meaning—and aren’t we always peeling back the words we have put in front of ourselves? Aren’t we chasing ourselves through a dark wood—like Emily, out with a lantern looking for ourselves? I just loved the accident of seeing this last night, the stark reminder that Hall wrestled with this honesty in a poem the same as I wrestle with honesty in a love poem, and that truthfulness is another way we fight fascism in our lives, and that love is about ultimately about telling the truth, about seeing another person as real.

I hope your winter solstice is filled with love and love poems.

Han

p.s. welcome to my new newsletter, as substack really has been on the grind for people like bari weiss

p.p.s. if you haven’t yet, you can preorder my book LARKS, and use the 40% discount SNOW at checkout!

Iris Murdoch—you know I love her—said that a bad review was about as interesting as whether it is raining in Patagonia. I tend to think about rejections this way. (Except: isn’t it interesting whether it’s raining in Patagonia? Shouldn’t it be, to a poet? Anyway, anyway…)

But here is the thing: I think about rejections as uninteresting when I am at my healthiest: mentally, physically, spiritually. When my chronic pain in under control, by some seasonal miracle/existential lottery. When my mental health is bobbing along like a rubber ducky in relatively calm bath water. When I’m not dwelling, to quote one Anne of Green Gables, in the “depths of despair.”

Roll back the camera to 2022, when I began trauma therapy, and found myself wildly outside my window of tolerance. I was hypoaroused after therapy sessions, which basically translates to a numb or dissociated state, which required (for me) a lot of processing time spent listening audiobooks and sewing. This whole year was not a good time for me to be submitting and receiving rejections on creative work—the emails literally made me flinch, and I deleted them as swiftly as possible—so I stopped sending work out. My inbox became peaceful, and my mind with it. I safeguarded myself, as much as I could. I wrote a little, but mostly I listened to audiobooks a LOT: Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker—books I could not have read before the therapy itself.

Consequently, in the year following this intense therapy (2023), I published a single poem. It was in a small journal (shout out to River Mouth Review), with editors I knew and trusted. Which brings me to my first point: I was in a survival state in 2022, and I reeled myself back and in, made my world smaller. It felt safer. For those of you coming back to writing after an absence of any kind, it might feel good to start with smaller journals, or a journal with an editor you know and trust, OR you might feel great sending your work out to a wide variety of journals. Do what feels best to you at that time, and be open to the fact that you will feel differently at different times in your life: moving, changing jobs, having a child, elections, health events, new school—any life events also affect how you feel about your writing, yourself, who you are, what it means to be you in the world, sending your work out, sharing it with others. Be gentle with yourself as you recalibrate, as your life changes. It is yourself that you revise.

My friend Benjamin Garcia said to me that he noticed a huge difference in acceptances when he began to send work out to more places—“…it’s a numbers game,” he said—and that it was helpful for him to see that, to prove it to himself. Yes, you receive more rejections, sending more work out. You also, potentially, receive more acceptances.

A word about where you send your attention—I do think it matters where we spend our energy, where we dwell, what we meditate on. Don’t meditate on your rejections. Don’t dwell there. I dwell in possibility, wrote Dickinson. I think the universe gives back to you what you give to it—I grew up fundamentalist evangelical, so know that this statement would be considered highly suspect by my own tradition. Alright, then, let me try another angle: it looks so, so bad to complain about rejections. Think for a moment about the optics: we all get rejections. We all empathize with the low feelings. But there are so many hardworking (majority unpaid!) editors and readers out there, at whom you are kind of complaining when you complain about rejections, and the same level of energy and joy doesn’t seem to be being put into the acceptances. Maybe try the practice of posting about acceptances only for a little while. See how that changes your social media experience for you. I say this on a personal note: I find the posting of screenshots of acceptances as well as rejections kind of jarring—as an editor, I don’t expect my correspondence to be posted online for thousands of people to read. But I guess that’s the author’s call, and I do think sharing positive energy is a hell of a lot better than dwelling in something as uninteresting as the fact that you poem didn’t fit the issue or jive with a particular reader on a particular day.

So you received a rejection—what now? Consider the poems in the packet. Do you still like them? Want to swap any of them out for work you are more excited about? Any revisions to make? Better title? Any spelling errors in your cover letter (hello, me this week)? Revise that packet, and send it back out. Dwell in possibility.

Find an accountability buddy, and update them on your submissions. I have a writer friend I let know when I send work out, because it helps me to know I’m reporting to someone—I need all the help I can get! Stop feeling alone in your rejections. Dwell in possibility.

I have noticed $3 fees are so much more common these days, so a word on cost and submitting. Y’all. I co-founded and co-edit a small press, River River Books, which Amorak Huey and I strive to make as self-sustaining as possible. Yes, we put our own money (several thousand) into starting it, but we have a business account and the press runs on its own dollars now. I also have a book coming out in the spring (Larks, which you can preorder now!), and I do not have a publicist myself. So I consider the $3 fee both a way of helping out small presses, because I know the costs, and a way of spending pennies on the publicity dollar. Just think about it—you place a poem in a magazine, and you also place your bio, and your book title, and your website. If someone likes your poem, maybe they look up your work. Publishing new work is one of the best ways to support your books, new or past.

Final thought is that sometimes you have to bless the rejection. Lord, there are rejections that have kept work from being in the world that, upon thought and reflection, my god I did not actually want in the world. Sometimes a no from the universe is a form of protection. Sometimes your bad luck saves you from worse. Remember that poem in The Nation? Yeah, baby. Anything that has you hiding your head or apologizing or donating to relief groups or or or—well, that’s karma.

Bless the rejection. Dwell in possibility.

I shared this addendum on Bluesky:

Something I wish I had included here is the fact that acceptances ALSO affect rejections—a single poem acceptance can soften SEVERAL subsequent rejections! And there’s some kind of proportional math at work, too, e.g., a manuscript acceptance takes care of many, many smaller rejections, for months, even a year of rejections, or more (it did, for me). 📚✍️ And prior to my first book, rejections were much more difficult, because of course a sense of validation is linked to one’s first book, even though you are a good writer before you publish a full-length collection.

All to say: many factors are involved when you receive and emotionally experience a rejection—a rejection is never simply a rejection, so consider multiple factors in your life, and be kind to yourself. And dwell in possibility. 💜

Little note I wrote on Instagram this morning: Larks (Ohio University Press, April 2025) has a cover, and it is a beauty. It’s not often you can ask for what you want, or receive what you want, but the conditions and the timing really came together here, and with OUP’s blessing I asked the artist Nicola Davison-Reed for permission to use her photograph “Breathing” for my cover. Nicola is a portrait artist based in the UK, and takes studio preparatory shots before she begins her sessions every day—this is one of those shots. (When I asked, she had just posted this photo and told me “this one is fresh as a daisy!”). Because these poems work with the documentary and multiple lenses, as well as the domestic (yes, there is a curtain blowing through), I have had one of Nicola’s photographs on my vision board for several years. It is SUCH a joy to feature one on Larks’ cover—both soft and spare and reflective and inclusive of the viewer. I can’t wait for you to read Larks in April. Holler at me if you want a review copy or to schedule a class visit or interview with me this spring.

Here is a blurb from Diane Seuss, that I’m so grateful to have—Seuss’s work has really spoken to me (speaks to me!) as poetry that springs up from a similar rural and working class landscape as the one I come from:

And some new poems! I don’t publish that much (one poem last year, seriously), because life is overwhelmingly and trauma work is real, y’all. But I’m grateful when I have the energy to submit, and even more grateful when a poem finds the right editor reader(s). Many thanks to the editors and journals below—all of the following poems are from my third manuscript, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely, which is most definitely my sexiest manuscript to date, ha.

Last but not least: AWP.

FRIENDS: once again, no panels accepted. I had a confused pity party for myself while trying to understand where our press registration had gone and trying to track information across AWP’s rather abysmal new website transition. One of these days I’m going to write the sexiest, most Southern, most documentary poetics panel that AWP has ever seen, and they will not be able to refuse it—in fact, they will pay US to present it, haha. A girlboy can dream. Anyway, please holler at me if you find yourself in want of a panelist. I’ve got a wide ranging background from 17th poetics to contemporary poetics, the sonnet and lyric tradition, epics and genre, Southerness, whiteness, writing trauma, mental health & healing, teaching vulnerable populations, neurodivergence, let’s goo. Also reach out if you’d like me to read with you. What with co-running the River River Books table, I don’t have a lot of energy for additional organizing, but I do want to attempt a modicum of a social life—especially with Larks debuting this AWP! I’m grateful for your consideration.

With the chill weather blowing in, and the frenetic pace of life, I hope you find a soft blanket and a hot cup of tea, and give yourself the permission to retreat into quiet today—because tomorrow the noise will still be there.

Han

My family is in the thick of carline mornings, both parents working, cusp of fall. I find myself so grateful for the access to books, texts, reading recommendations—especially digital and audio, especially via library apps like Libby. I’m always listening to a novel on audiobook, now (Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie at the moment, Piranesi by Susannah Clarke and Witch King by Martha Wells before that, and all The Murderbot Diaries this summer!), and podcasts accompany me when I walk or do the dishes, laundry. I love reading something just before bed—James Tate, lately (highly recommend his Selected Poems), but that quiet time solely with a book is rather rare. Of course there’s the kind of neurodivergent attention which does WELL doing multiple things (hello folks who knit and sew during tv, lectures, audiobooking), so I’m happy to accommodate my busy life with audio.

Although my job right now is writing faculty tutor at Wake Tech Community College here in North Carolina, I have a kind and supportive boss who secured grant money for me to lead a (free for students!) Friday creative writing workshop, and that begins today. I’m really grateful for this—the job, the workshop. Community-making. Academia is a mess right now, and it’s hard inside and outside traditional professor jobs. I think I’m—well, really happy working at Wake, and having time for Of Poetry Podcast (Fall guests & episodes include Sebastian Paramo, Nicholas Molbert, Emilie Menzel, Jay Ward, Molly Peacock and Dana Delibovi, Carolyn Oliver, Abbie Kiefer, Violeta Garcia-Mendoza, and Sarah Carey!) and Moist Poetry Journal. We’re just wrapping up our Deep Summer publishing period at Moist, and you should check out these lovely poems, including three new visual poems by poet and collagist Sarah J. Sloat, whose work I love!

Some folks in the literary community who continually impress me with their generosity include David Naimon, host of Between the Covers podcast. I’m currently listening to his interview with Sri Lankan writer Vadra Chandrasekera, and it is blowing my mind. Since my very literary PhD ( 17C literature, theology, philosophy), I have had more time to read (recreationally at all!) widely across genres, and what a time we are living in for science fiction and fantasy! I love that David makes space for all genres on his podcast, from poetry to sci-fi to translation. David really models that we read best with each other, in a community where all are welcome.

I also love what Bob Sykora and Chris Corlew are doing over at The Line Break podcast—you could not find two warmer or more generous readers of poetry. If you love basketball, you’ll be excited for the end of every podcast (I listen and let the delight of the foreign language wash over me!).

I hope you are all finding time for words, language, and reading in community. Happy nearly-September!

Han

If you'd like a review copy (digital or print) of my forthcoming poetry collection Larks when available, send me your name and address(es), and I'll add you to my list! I'm also available for readings (in person/zoom), class visits, interviews, podcasts. Just give me a holler.

Larks description: The core of Larks is rural and mythic and true, circling genealogies of silence and harm in a Southern family, focusing on the relationship and memories of three sisters and Ovid’s telling of Philomel. The landscape of Larks is Southern and country, inhabited by cows, goats, chickens, and barn kittens as much as by the speaker and their sisters, the brother, and the mother. In the book, the lyric poem becomes a vehicle for parsing and articulating history and the self, from the experience of a sister’s home birth to the traumatic erasure (and recovery) of the speaker’s memory. The book’s setting is existential and domestic, tender while also full of sharp grief and documentation. A work of poetic-memoir, Larks asks if poetry can hold the heaviest truths we carry, and the answer is a resounding yes.

Opening poem sneak preview (unpublished), because who doesn’t love an invocation to the muse/to the birds:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedInvocationI do not know whether it is morning or mourning,the name of the doves calling in the hems of daysometimes, I do not know the spelling of a single wordor why the couple gesture in their car making a left turntonight the clouds settle on the mountains: pale pinkand then mist, and then no mountainalmost every day I say to someone: “it is not important”but the wing of it the beak the onyx eye is that I do not know this either

It is not everyday you get to sit and talk with a poet you so deeply admire—for their ethics, their lyric making, their teaching; for the way they write the domestic; for their attention to art and landscape; for their understanding that all of this attention is political, and has both a cost and an invitation implicit in it.

I’m sending out this note to invite you to listen to Molly Spencer’s conversation with me on of Of Poetry Podcast, Episode 55: (Of Invitation, Bridges and Water, and How Should We Live?). Molly has a (prolonged, and patiently endured) health issue keeping her from promoting her book this summer, and so I especially want to urge my friends to find a copy of her book, share photos on online, share it with a close friend or two, have your library order it, brag about it to your local bookseller (they will order it!).

I really, really mean this.

Uplifting each other’s work is one of the most precious things we can do for each other as writers, as it is an impossible thing to do for yourself (you cannot be another person advocating for your work!).

Here is a link to purchase Invitatory at Parlor Press—note that you can get an ecopy for $10! In the meantime, please join Molly and me on Of Poetry Podcast for this lovely conversation involving windows, rivers and lakes, Catholicism, the Via Negativa, Calvino and more!

I don’t write many reviews just now—children and my job and River River Books (joyfully!) receive most of my hours—so I want to celebrate this review at Poetry Northwest with you, because Diane Seuss is doing work that I genuinely think most major American poets cannot: writing poetry that has a clear-eyed gaze towards class, and life lived at the wide and rural borders, edges, margins.

I hope you enjoy, and I hope you find your copy of Modern Poetry and teach it, read it, share it with friends. Happy friday, dear poets.

Read the review here.