All Of The Books I Can Remember Reading So Far This Year And What I Remember About Them

I just finished reading Goat In The Snow by Emily Pettit and I liked it. It reminded me of Heather Christle, but instead of each poem being an imagasm (image after image that don't really add to a whole [this is also based on the three-year-old memory of my reading of The Difficult Farm which was charming and cute, but lacked an intellectual, political, and emotional punch {I did just buy The Trees The Trees and this review of What is Amazing makes the book sound amazing so I'm giving Christle another try}]), there is an accretion of images and ideas and feelings. The accretion takes place across the whole book, poem upon poem. When I first picked up the book and read a poem or two, I was kind of annoyed. It seemed pretty random and I didn't feel anything emotional or beautiful or intellectually engaging from the individual poems. It wasn't until I started reading the whole book that I got a sense of what the poems were doing and how they were doing it. It felt like the poems were asking big questions about life. How can we understand so much about the universe and still know very little about our own desires, impulses, thoughts, and actions. If we can calculate pi to the ten trillionth digit, why are we still so goddamned lonely? These aren't actually in the book, but this was the feeling I got when I read it. It felt like there were a lot of questions and a lot of repetitions of minutiae. I guess I connect obsession with repetition and minutiae with loneliness. If I was going to give this book a subtitle it would be: Goat In The Snow: Poems On Science, Math, And Loneliness.

I just wrote about Selected Unpublished Blogposts Of A Mexican Panda Express Employee. I bought another copy of it today.

I wrote about M Kitchell's Variations On The Sun at HTMLGiant.

I read most of Antwerp by Roberto Bolaño. It's probably my favorite short Bolaño so far. Much better than The Return, a collection of shorts, and a million times better than his poetry. It doesn't compare to The Savage Detectives or to 2666, but it's very very good.

Poetry Is Not A Project. It's so good. I found a copy of it at the Marfa Book Company. I was so so so excited. It's well made, full of beauty, emotion, and intellect. It helps me think about poetry outside of a craft perspective, outside of workshop modes of reading and writing poems.

To The Chapel Of Light by Joshua Young. Beautiful book by Mud Luscious. At once quiet and loud, cold and humid, violent and intimate. I remember being frustrated by its obsession with music a little too much. The over-all tone of the book is religious and apocalyptic. The narrative doesn't exist.

It Chooses You by Miranda July. This book was weird and awesome. I loved how she was so focused on writing/making the movie that she sort of lost sight of the fact that she was creating a beautiful text.

Daniel Fights a Hurricane by Shane Jones kicked my ass. I think I liked it so much and I had such an emotional reaction because I am irrationally afraid of a nervous breakdown. Mix with that a love story and an adventure and you have this beautiful novel. I love everything by Shane and I think I own every book he's ever published except his chapbook by Mud Luscious. If anyone has that, please let me look at it at least...

Pretty Tilt by Carrie Murphy. Loved this book. I can't recommend it enough. I've bought three copies for gifts already.

Partyknife by Dan Magers. Ditto. I interviewed Dan and Carrie at the same time at HTMLGiant.

I wrote about The Roman Letters by Evan Calder Williams a little before. This book kinda changed my life a little. It's at once intense and casual, concise and lyric, serious and fun book. It seems like Zizek would write a book like this is he was a young American. He's writing a really cool serial piece, called Desecration Hardware, for The New Inquiry right now.

I Take Back The Sponge Cake was really good. Choose your own poetry will be a thing in the next few years I think.

I've read a lot of Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral. Seems very prescient and important. Like Crush but with illegal immigration and Latin American culture.

The Collected Fanzines by Harmony Korine inspired me to not worry so much about craft and just make. I made two zines this year and I thank this book for that accomplishment.

I'm most of the way through Mark Leyner's My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (spelled it right on the first try!) which is pretty fucking amazing. I picked it up because it was mentioned in a DFW essay about televisual culture. I see so much of this book in people like Lara Glenum and Johannes Göransson. It's almost as if he merges disparate discoures and forms this new discourse to the syntax and form of literary fiction. I'm reading it while I workout.

I know there were more, but I can't think of any right now.

A Published Blogpost In The Style Of And About Selected Unpublished Blogposts of A Mexican Panda Express Employee

i've never met megan boyle and never been her friend on facebook and i've never followed her on twitter except when her and tao lin got married. i think i unfollowed her when i unfollowed bebe zeva. i think she must have an interesting online presence and probably should follow her or something

i just googled bebe zeva and i'm really glad that i unfollowed her when i did. seems like bebe is so mainstream now

i was surprised she never said, 'seems bleak' in the whole book. thought, 'maybe 'seems bleak' was only popular after she wrote it, or 'seems bleak' was edited out because the phrase wasn't 'cool anymore''

i read 'everyone i've had sex with' when it was in thought catalogue. i wanted to do that too, but i have a hard time getting over the shame that occurs when i list them in my head. the people i've had sex with who might read this aren't the ones that would bother me, but the ones that would never read this in a million years

i did make a list of what the people i've had sex with would be if each person was the celebrity they most resembled. at the time i made the list, one of them was a muppet and one of them was channing tatum

there weren't a lot of 'poems' in the book. i felt like i was reading a memoir. there were a few good poems though

there was one part where she says all she wants to do is live somewhere warm and drive trucks and i think she is driving trucks as a job now. she is living her dreams

there were some really sentimental moments in the book which was surprising. i guess i have this assumption about muumuu house that their aesthetic is about extreme detachment. megan boyle seems very attached to the world, even if she doesn't feel connected all the time

i bought the book for my sister for christmas because my sister is around the same age. i ended up reading the whole book before i sent it to her. i took pictures of the parts i liked:

the idea of taking online quizzes in your head is really funny.

in 2009 i made a list of new year's resolutions. first on the list was 'don't die'

second on the list was 'don't fall in love'