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Immortal Soft-Spoken by Robert Vivian
“O indigence at the roots of our lives,
how poor is the language of happiness!”
-Osip Mandelstam, “Trisitia”
“With the gathering force of an essential thing
realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in
myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put
away thought forever, and all the trouble it brings,
all but the nearest desire, direct and searching.
To take the trail and not look back.”
-John Haines, The Stars, the Snow, the Fire
“All the world began with a yes. One molecule
said yes to another molecule and life was born.”
-Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
Sad Girl Poems by Christopher Soto
“I was never ready and could you see it in the way time collapsed in my syntax? Because melancholia is the inability to sequentialize.”
-Jackie Wang
Mexicamericana by Eloisa Amezcua
“The border is a line that birds cannot see.”
-Alberto Ríos, “The Border: A Double Sonnet”
Rivers of Suggestion by April Richardson
“The written word is an attempt at completeness when there is no one impatiently awaiting you in a dimly lit bedroom— awaiting your tales of the day, as the healing hands of someone who knew turn to you and touch you, and you lose yourself so completely in another that you are momentarily delivered from yourself. Whispering across the pillow comes a kind voice that might tell you how to get out of certain difficulties, from someone who might mercifully detach you from your complications. When there is no matching of lives, and we live on a strict diet of the self, the most intimate bond can be the words that we write.”
-from Morrissey’s autobiography
49 Venezuelan Novels by Sebastian Castillo
“Writing long books is a laborious and impoverishing act of foolishness: expanding in five hundred pages an idea that could be perfectly explained in a few minutes.”
-Jorge Luiz Borges
“The world give you itself in fragments
/ in splinters”
-Mario Santiago Papasquiaro
Radiant Companion by Matt Hart
“… O most loving soul,
Placed on this earth to love and understand
And from thy presence shed the light of love,
Shall I be mute, ere thou be spoken of?”
-William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” (1805)
“Could you be the one they talk about?
Hiding inside, behind another door?
Is it only happiness you want?
Does wanting a feeling matter anymore?”
-Hüsker Dü
“We are the pulse that beats
and we are the breath that flows
and we will scream along until our hearts stop.”
-The Saddest Landscape
Radiant Action by Matt Hart
“… scream my songs / into lazy floods of stars...”
-Jim Carroll
Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine
“And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear…”
-Aime Cesaire
while they sleep / under the bed is another country by Raquel Salas Rivera
“i look for you, my friend,
but do you look for me?”
-hurray for the riff raff, “pa’lante”
“sigue tu camino que sin ti me va major”
-bad bunny, “soy peor”
Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
“Oh my God, oh my God
If I die, I’m a legend”
-Drake
“he who wore death discourages any plague”
-Sonia Sanchez
Vigilias by José C. Carreño Medina
“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
-T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff by Sara Borjas
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us, and which knows only the oppressors’ tactics, the oppressors’ relationships.”
-Audre Lorde
“Home is a place, for better or for worse, we learn to love.”
-Cherríe Moraga
Prelude to a Bruise by Saeed Jones
“The man and the man drowning—both throw up their arms.”
-Kafka
Antidote by Corey Van Landingham
“There is scarce any thing that hath not killed somebody; a hair, a feather hath done it; nay, that which is our best antidote against it hath done it; the best cordial hath been deadly poison.”
-John Donne, VII. Meditation
Annarcho-Transhumanism: A Journal of Radical Possibility & Striving – Issue 4: Outer Space and Cosmic Ambitions
“The thought processes of a tribe, a clan, a country or a nation-state are essentially two-dimensional, and the nature of their power depends on the same flatness. Territory is all-important; resources, living-space, lines of communication; all are determined by the nature of the plane (that the plane is in fact a sphere is irrelevant here); that surface, and the fact the species concerned are bound to it during their evolution, determines the mind-set of a ground-living species. The mind-set of an aquatic or avian species is, of course, rather different.
Essentially, the contention is that our currently dominant power systems cannot long survive in space; beyond a certain technological level a degree of anarchy is arguably inevitable and anyway preferable.
To survive in space, ships/habitats must be self-sufficient, or very nearly so; the hold of the state (or the corporation) over them therefore becomes tenuous if the desires of the inhabitants conflict significantly with the requirements of the controlling body. On a planet, enclaves can be surrounded, besieged, attacked; the superior forces of a state or corporation - hereafter referred to as hegemonies - will tend to prevail. In space, a break-away movement will be far more difficult to control, especially if significant parts of it are based on ships or mobile habitats.”
-Iain M. Banks
The Sobbing School by Joshua Bennett
“I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it… No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.”
-Zora Neale Hurston
Deep Lane by Mark Doty
“As the traveler who has lost his way throws his reins on his horse’s neck, and trusts to the instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“All right then, I’ll go to Hell.”
-Mark Twain
Spooky Action at a Distance by Dalton Day
“In physics, action at a distance is the concept that an object can be moved, changed, or otherwise affected without being physically touched (as in mechanical contact) by another object. That is, it is the nonlocal interaction of objects that are separated in space. Pioneering physicist Albert Einstein described the phenomenon as ‘spooky action at a distance’.”
-Wikipedia
What Loss Taught Me by Stephen Furlong
“I want to trace the lines and wrinkles,
I want to mend
Th scars while we have time and care
Enough to break the rope, the
Selfishness
That binds. Long
May this light blast down on us.”
-Bruce Weigl, from “Sun”
“There’s a big, a big hard sun
Beating on the big people
In the big hard world.”
-Eddie Vedder, from “Hard Sun”
The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
“How long does a man spend dying?
What does it mean to say ‘for ever’?”
-Pablo Neruda
Collected Poems (1947-1997) by Allen Ginsberg
“Things are symbols of themselves.”
Rimbaud Complete by Arthur Bimbaud, translated by Wyat Mason
“What will become of the world when you leave?
No matter what happens, no trace of now will remain.”
-“Youth, IV”
Illuminations
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
“The superfluous, that very necessary thing…”
-Voltaire
“The secret of being a bore is to say everything.”
-Voltaire
On the Origin of Stories by Brian Boyd
“We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats.”
-Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (1962)
Too Good to Be True by Jan Harold Brunvand
“Scholar Jan Brunvand calls tales of fatal Pop Rocks candy and hook-handed molesters this kind of ‘legend.’”
Question: What is urban?
(Topic on Jeopardy, October 24, 1997)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
“… one flew east, one flew west,
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest.”
-Children’s folk rhyme
Dunce by Mary Ruefle
“Last night as I lay sleeping I dreamt
O, marvelous error—
That there was a beehive here inside my heart
And the golden bees were making white combs
And sweet honey from all my failures”
-Antonio Machado
Trances of the Blast by Mary Ruefle
“Go, and take the little book which is open in the hand. Take it, and eat it up; and it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey, but it shall make thy belly bitter.”
-Revelation X
The Sky Contains the Plans by Matthew Rohrer
“Sometimes I speak and I feel like it ain’t my words
Like I’m just a vessel channeling inside this universe”
-Joey Bada$$
“a gorgeous knot of words hovers before my face
when I fall asleep”
-Susie Timmons
SoundMachine by Rachel Zucker
“There’s no cure for the shame of writing.”
-Wayne Koestenbaum
“agape állos érōs állos philia állos storgē állos
another nother other the o’er the her
agape érōs philia storgē”
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
“’It is so good to renew one’s wonder,’ said the philosopher. ‘Space travel has again made children of us all.’”
On Looking by Lia Purpura
“Every object, well contemplated, creates an organ for its perception.”
-Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“… I was also caught by absence
in all its forms.”
-Paul Eluard
Night Moves by Jessica Hopper
“Ain’t it funny how the night moves
When you just don’t seem to have as much to lose”
-Bob Seger, “Night Moves”
My Feelings by Nick Flynn
“You cannot fold a Flood—
And put it in a Drawer—”
I Will Destroy You by Nick Flynn
“How is it we have walked through fire & yet are not consumed?”
Naming the Dead by Robert Collins
“Now let us go into the blind world waiting here below…”
-Dante, The Inferno
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
“Lawyers, I suppose, were children once.”
-Charles Lamb
Screenplay by Syd Field
“My task… is to make you hear, to make you feel—and, above all, to make you see. That is all, and it is everything.”
-Joseph Conrad
I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg by Bill Morgan
“I CELEBRATE myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”
-Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”
Mastermind: How to think like Sherlock Holmes by Maria Konnikova
Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences. As Ortega y Gassewt said: ‘Tell me to what you pay attention, and I will tell you who you are.’”
-W.H. Auden
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig
“And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?”
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
“It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”
Performance by Diana Taylor
“What I shall have to say here is neither difficult nor contentious; the only merit I should like to claim is that of being true, at least in parts.”
-J.L. Austen, How to Do Things with Words
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
“These ceremonials in honor of white supremacy, performed from babyhood, slip from the conscious mind down deep into muscles… and become difficult to tear out.”
-Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (1949)
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
“One question that has always intrigued me is what happens to demonic beings when immigrants move from their homelands. Irish-Americans remember the fairies, Norwegian Americans the nisser, Greek-Americans the vrykólakas, but only in relation to events remembered in the Old Country. When I once asked why such demons are not seen in America, my informants giggled confusedly and said, ‘They’re scared to pass the ocean, it’s too fair,’ pointing out that Christ and the apostles never came to America.”
-Richard Dorson, “A Theory for American Folklore,”
American Folklore and the Historian
(University of Chicago Press, 1971)
The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea
“Must I go alone
like flowers that die?
Will nothing remain
of my name?
Nothing of my fame
here on earth?
At least my flowers,
at least my songs…”
-Aycuan Cuetzpaltzin
“This is my confession of love.”
-Rick Elias
Space Invaders by Nona Fernández
“I am at the mercy of this dream:
I know it’s just a dream
but I can’t escape it.”
-Georges Perec, La boutique obscure
Looking for Alaska by John Green
“I have tried so hard to do right.”
(last words of President Grover Cleveland)
Baba by Rampuri
“It is only by the Grace of God
That one years for union with Him,
And escapes serious danger.”
-The Avadhut Gita of Dattatreya
The Wisdom of Yoga by Stephen Cope
“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time—or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”
-Annie Dillard, For the Time Being
Aghora II: Kundalini by Robert E. Svoboda
“She, the Eternal One, is the Supreme Knowledge, the cause of freedom from delusion and the cause of the bondage of manifestation. She indeed is sovereign over all sovereigns.”
-Devi Mahatmya, I.57-58
The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life by Karin Roffman
“Our knowledge isn’t much it’s just a small amount
But you feel it quick inside you when you’re down for the count”
-“The Songs We Know Best”
“Of course Eurydice vanished into the shade;
She would have even if he hadn’t turned around.”
-“Syringa”
They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
“I wish to live because life has within it that which is good, that which is beautiful, and that which is love. Therefore, since I have known all of these things, I have found them to be reason enough and I wish to live. Moreover, because this is so, I wish others to live for generations and generations and generations and generations.”
-Lorraine Hansberry
“I cannot die because this is my universe.”
-Lil Uzi Vert
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay,” saith the Lord.
-Romans 12:19
City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O’Hara by Brad Gooch
“I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know
there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some
other sign that people do not totally regret life.”
-Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”
A Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 by Claire Hartfield
“Sometimes I growl, shake myself and
spatter a few red drops for history
to remember. Then—I forget.”
-Carl Sandburg, “I Am the People, the Mob”
Shallcross by C.D. Wright
“Be Still. The Hanging Gardens were a dream”
-Trumbull Stickney
Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson
“We walk on air, Watson.
There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorous.
There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.”
-Sylvia Plath, “The Detective”
October 1, 1962
The Oldest Map with the Name America by Lucia Perillo
“The printing press could disseminate, but it could not retrieve. Waldseemüller himself learned the fantastic, irreversible reach of this new technology. When Waldseemüller changed his mind and decided that after all Amerigo Vespucci should not be credited as the true discoverer of the New World, it was too late… his map was already diffused in a thousand places and could not be recalled.”
-Daniel Boorstin, The Discoverers
Myths of the Hindus and Buddhists by Ananda K. Coormaraswamy and Sister Nivedita
“Créer un mythe, c’est-à-dire entrevoir derrière la réalité sensible une réalité supérieure, est le signe le olus manifeste de la grandeur de l’âme humaine et la prevue de sa faculté de croissance et de développement infinis. “
-A. Sabatier, 1879
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