inhales: everything i read in summer 2024

LOTS OF POETRY!!! and books about weightlifting, parenting, and sexuality

I’ve been very excited about this $13 smart plug I bought from IKEA so that I can turn my lamp on from across my bedroom without crawling out of bed and into the cold as fall is properly here now, which I can tell by the fact that I’m freezing and pissed when I go outside and because I am sick for the third time in the last two months, which is a new record for me. I used to get sick like this in university but I attribute that to the fact that I wasn’t sleeping back then and people used to regularly shit in the showers and run away to avoid being caught.

i’ve wanted to make comics regularly for a very long time — but have really struggled to do so. recently it’s become much easier to do when i try to think of drawing it for just one person or with the goal of just making one person laugh. id like to do this as a practice more

This summer, I read 15 books, including:

• 3 novels

• 9 poetry collections / field notes / poems

• 3 nonfiction books about women’s sexuality, weightlifting, and parenting

I’ve been thinking about autoethnographies in general, and also wanting to do more playful things with this newsletter and giving myself more low-stakes opportunities to draw or make something. I recently did some collage-making with some friends and have been getting more into comics lately, so I wanted to try incorporating that into this letter💗

fiction

⋆ Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar — finished while recovering from wisdom teeth surgery. In it, Cyrus, an addict obsessed with martyrs, partly from his mother being shot down in a plane when he was a child, travels to Brooklyn to speak with a dying artist. I was at my boyfriend’s house, reading in bed. The quality of light in his room was putting me to sleep. He was calling his friends and his headphones were on and his voice was carrying me like a leaf. I woke up, turned a page, dozed off. I like Kaveh Akbar’s poems— I felt like in some parts of the book he was really accessing the same register his poems access, and those were my favourite:

Grace: that I had enough money to get to Turkey. That I dressed in layers for cold. That long train ride alternating between crying so hard it was hard to tell if I was crying or laughing, and then feeling totally numb, a numb that terrified me with its stillness. Like a dead bird with all its guts scooped out.

Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

⋆Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran — I read most of this in bed. And the pages smelled good. In 1970s NYC Malone, a beautiful (very important fact) young man immerses himself in the gay scene with Sutherland, a local socialite. I found it enjoyable for its real earnest description of romance, and for the funny parts, but by the end really wanted it to be over and couldn’t quite articulate why. But when we read, obviously how we’re feeling and what our life looks like will colour the entire experience of the reading. Funny, still:

“So much raw life. Very Hogarth. Very pretty!” he said, as a man stood shaking his penis against the wind shield of a car stopped for a red light, whose driver, a young woman, stared bravely on into the distance, ignoring its presence.

Andrew Holleran, Dancer from the Dance

⋆ Clarice Lispector’s A Breath of Life — full of these mysterious fragments — this was the last book written before Lispector’s death. In it, an author creates Angela, who is also a writer, and they speak to each other but not quite. It’s true what they say: no one else could write a sentence like Clarice Lispector.

nonfiction

⋆ Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski — which I listened to on my runs, an exploration of female sexuality grounded in scientific research. She discusses how norms shape women’s sexual experience and is a real proponent of understanding your body as the vehicle to taking ownership of your experience. Informative! Validating! I cried a couple times listening to it. Usually when I am feeling scared or worried about something, learning more about it always makes it less huge and scary.

⋆ How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes by

Melinda Wenner Moyer

— because I really like her newsletter and because I read an excerpt from it about siblings torturing each other that made me laugh out loud. Lots of studies on child development / psychology referenced. Lots of hilarious anecdotes:

One of their house rules was that the television couldn’t be on while either of the kids practiced the piano. Knowing this, my friend devised a devious plan: She waited until right before her brother’s favorite TV show was about to start, and then she announced it was time for her to practice. This wasn’t the first time she’d done it, and this time, her brother began incoherently screaming and opened up the knife drawer—at which point my friend wisely fled out the front door.

Melinda Wenner Moyer, How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes

⋆ The Art of Lifting by Omar Isuf and Greg Nuckols — everyone is really into protein these days, including me, and this was accessible, informative, and a little bro-ey, but is a pretty no-BS comprehensive introductory guide to strength training and effective lifting strategies. Very practical, which all of my non-fiction books were this season.

poetry

⋆ Magdalene: Poems by Marie Howe — who I think is amazing and who really gets to the bottom of it¹. I read some of her poems thinking, wow I love how she writes about sex and the body. And I showed some poems to people I love and I happened to be reading the collection right as one of my writing groups (Boston-based Chickadee Collective, woo!!!) was talking about it. A sign that it was the right book for the moment.

A dim light far in the distance? No. To love—I had to be there. I had to be there to be loved.

Marie Howe, Magdalene

⋆ Don Mckay’s Vis a Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness was cool — a combination of reflections on the creative process and wilderness. My favourite thing in that collection was a poem about Achilles after he loses his dear lover and friend Patroclus. That one went crazy. But I forget what the poem is called. I also read another by Mckay, Lurch, and there are a lot of really pretty images in there, with a religious-y vibe about nature if that’s your thing.

I was in a frenzy trying to finish my library books on time again (one of my current toxic traits is interpreting the overdue status of my library book as a 30-day extension of my hold since they do not get marked as lost until then), and many of them were poetry collections from nominees of the Griffin Poetry Prize:

⋆ Door by Ann Lauterbach, which was mysterious and birdlike and made me think of how baller she looked while she was reading the poems at the awards ceremony.

⋆ I loved Jorie Graham’s To 2040, which was this big white hardcover collection that felt like a picture book, and was also birdlike, but heavy with loss. Sarah Howe read in her place at the awards ceremony and she had the most gorgeous, resonant reading voice. Like Roger Reeves, I felt like she was speaking straight into the blood of everyone in the audience². Jorie Graham is old and her voice is so cool. These days I’ve been really into poems that work in a register that sound like how we usually talk or text, or that access some new register that feels SO different…sometimes they feel a bit like a robot or alien sifting through debris from a very long time ago.

⋆ Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, by Homero Aridjis — the winner of the Griffin prize. The collection is both in Spanish and English with translations side by side. When they announced him winning they said this beautiful thing about butterfly migration and I don’t remember the whole thing, but it feels significant to mention.

⋆ Unstable Neighbourhood Rabbit, by Mikko Harvey — not a Griffin nom, but who I heard about through ONLY POEMS and whose poems are so vulnerable. I liked them:

Anyway, I do / spend my days / in an office now / and I read / Henri Cole / at night sometimes / and I love / making you cum / more than almost / anything / and I’m talking / to my dad / on Zoom later— / he’s getting surgery, / I’m scared, / and there’s a lot / we haven’t said.

Mikko Harvey, Dirty Poem

⋆ Sylvie Baumgartel’s Song of Songs: A Poem — a contemporary rendition of the original biblical text, which I became obsessed with right after opening it. Such a fun, sexy, unique voice, so immediate, so devoted. I loved it. It reminds me of when Ocean Vuong was talking about Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, reminded him of what words can do — I felt that way about this book. It was so gorgeous and desperate:

My love is my desire to please you. Love is the desire to please. Love is my body belonging to you. Love is my feet are your feet my hands are your hands my coming is your coming to please you please you my flesh is your flesh my flesh is your flesh my mind is love for you my thoughts are love for you my everything is the desire to love you woof woof woof please please please please. I love you. I love you. A thousand times more today than yesterday. A thousand times more.

Sylvie Baumgartel, Song of Songs

⋆ Indigo by Ellen Bass, which was recommended to me by my friend E who hosted me in Boston for a poetry retreat as a book with “some of the best horny poems ever”. I connected with many of them, though not as many were horny in the way I thought they would be. I remember a post going around where people were pissed to have their writing be deemed accessible. Is it really so bad to be accessible? Being able to connect with many people, after all, is what I associate with some of my most generous friends. My favourite poem was the titular Indigo:

I want to have married a man who wanted
to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much
that he marked it up like a book, underlining,
highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.
Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always
fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours
on his zafu chanting om and then went out
and broke his hand punching the car.

Ellen Bass, Indigo

It was a difficult but transformative summer, and so were the books I read, and sometimes it is just that way.

1. i dont really know how to articulate this beyond , her writing makes me see things new and clear. to me she is one of those writers who picks the right..no..the ONLY word… to describe something. i.e., the use of ‘chapped face’ in what the living do

2. he had a great acceptance speech too sorry im just so envious of his VOICE