Your Hold is Ready! (05.14.23.)

Hi all, and happy May!

So many scary, exciting things are happening for me right now –– as a third-year PhD student, I take my qualifying exams this month (starting TOMORROW!), a combination of oral and written tests that determine whether or not I advance to candidacy (AKA, become “all-but-dissertation” and officially finish my coursework). If all goes well, after this month, I’ll be able to devote my time as a student exclusively to my planned dissertation! This is roughly the halfway point of my doctoral program, which I really can’t believe.

So much has changed since 2020, after all! In addition to being fresh out of undergrad in the depths of the pandemic, I had only just started my work with Stone of Madness, I had never published an academic article and was still early in my “writing career” (as it were!). I hadn’t started thinking about transMadness, the main analytic I’ve developed for my dissertation, yet! And I certainly had no clue I would feel so comfortable, so free, and so fulfilled living across the country from the places I call/ed home. While I don’t necessarily consider California “home,” I am really glad to have this space to explore what it means to be an adult, to live on my own, to take responsibility for myself and joy in the freedom that affords.

In my “creative writing,” life, perhaps even more has changed –– my debut novel, Failure to Comply (goodreads link!), is coming out next summer with featherproof books. The first excerpt of the novel is out now with Travesties magazine! Most recently, I also visited San Francisco to read How to Know if You Are Trans Enough: a ten-step plan for transreal-ization with Sinister Wisdom, in honor of their fantastic Trans/Feminisms issue. You can check out that reading here!

Okay, I think that’s all from me right now. I so appreciate the opportunity to curate this newsletter, it has been especially helpful these days as I attempt, with limited success, to manage my own anxiety about my fast-approaching exams. (I actually received an email about them as I was typing the previous paragraph!) Hopefully, something here will catch your eye and provide you a bit of respite from the chaos of your work/school/life, too.

Today’s Recs:

Books:

• Sikranth Reddy, Voyager.

• Vivek Shreya, She of the Mountains.

• Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (anthology)

• Ruha Benjamin, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want.

• Jeff Noon, Automated Alice.

Music & Podcasts:

• corook & Olivia Barton, if i were a fish (2023).

• LIA LIA, Love & Melancholy (2022)

• Sandy & Nora Talk Politics

• Futility Closet

Poetry & Prose & In-Between:

• Jenny Johnson, Good Bully (2023).

• Lucy Zhang, Final Molt (2023).

• jos charles, untitled poem (2023).

• Karisma Price, Looking at Houses on Zillow I Know I Can’t Afford, I Hurt My Feelings (2023).

• Iryna Shuvalova, tr. Uilleam Blacker, vesper (2023).

• Emily Zogbi, Sundown (2023).

• Simon Shieh, Act I (2021).

• Matthew Tuckner, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, With Figurative Language (2023).

• Rebecca Liebendorfer, What Happened? (2023).

Essays and Articles:

• Arielle Isack, I'm Fucking Agitated, Are You Going to Murder Me? (2023)

• Craig Santos Perez, from 'A Poetics of Continuous Presence and Erasure'. (2013).

My Recent Work:

• My fourth chapbook, bugbutter, is available from Gap Riot Press and up on Goodreads.

• My third chapbook, Out of Mind & Into Body, is available from Ethel Press and up on Goodreads.

• to they for whom I am in the passenger seat in ANMLY Lit.

• How to Know if You Are Trans Enough: a ten-step plan for transreal-ization in Sinister Wisdom 127: trans/feminisms.

• Master Doc: in Spoon Knife 7: Transitions.

• transfinite::a dialogue in Just Femme & Dandy

• Two Poems in Electric Lit: The Commuter

• The Queer Aut of Failure: Cripistemic Openings for Postgraduate Life in Lateral: The Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

• Headcase! in The New Orleans Review.

• The Beholding & Beheld in Nat Brut.

• Hybrid Interview: Claire Oshetsky in CRAFT Literary.

• I AM GOING TO TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT MOLI in X-Ray Lit.That’s all for now! Again, feel free to let me know what you think, what you’d like to see more of, and if you have any recommendations of your own!