connecting dots & The Moon That Turns You Back
tiny ritual & poetry review, on each full moon
hello.
Yesterday was Mother’s Day, a day which lands differently for each of us, I know. I cherish my mom, now in her 80s. I’m truly lucky. On Saturday, she had a pretty serious choking scare. I was across the Atlantic for a job, and didn’t learn about the scare until I got back on Monday night. I’d spoken to her on Sunday and she said “love you” about seven times, which I thought was odd. We are all hanging by a thin golden thread, I suppose. My love and I chose not to be parents, a choice that I mostly honor, sometimes grieve. Even in that choice, I sense threads connecting me across some space I can’t quite define. No need to. These days, I put my more tangible energy into creating a comfortable space for my parents to age, surrounded by family. A sort of reverse mothering. So many of us are mothering and being mothered, across different portals, across textured griefs, across species and bodies, and in unexpected directions.
tiny review
Hala Alyan’s fifth poetry collection The Moon That Turns You Back inverts linear time, and disrupts distinctions between person and place. In this poetry collection, body and land merge (“The land looks white on the MRI images: / you call your grandfather. He’s been finding the land / in his stool”), in the context of Palestinian diaspora, occupation and genocide (“It’s so hot under that hospital elevator. / That’s no place for a child’s braid”). These grievous threads reverberate in the body of the poet (“Can I pull the land from me like a cork?”) trying to conceive, and navigating infertility, ectopic pregnancy, and miscarriage (“I’ve been waiting: your evil eye, your dime-store voodoo, // the two million eggs I burn like Vegas money”), as well as the deaths of loved ones (“the day will / come when a young woman in Beirut will muscle / her way through a nightclub and dance until her / feet hurt, and I won’t be on this earth anymore”). Grief and birth permeate the book, which begins with a Jean Valentine epigraph: “Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.” And yet, Alyan attempts to. The collection is divided into 12 parts, each marked with a crescent shape, mirroring the cycles of the moon across the year. Natural cycles are unwound, all around a core of longing to return to something less fractured (“They like me when I spit my father from my mouth”), more whole (“I’m here to tell you the tide will never stop coming in. / I’m here to tell you whatever you build will be ruined, so make it beautiful”). Comfort and destruction are juxtaposed (“Can you believe the apple trees this year? / Pink as slaughter. Perfect for a photo shoot. / Today I cut calories but at night I eat worms”). The book arcs towards methods for retrieval, and towards choice within personal and political histories (“Can you diagnose fear? The red tree blooming from uterus / to throat. It’s one long nerve, the doctor says. There’s a reason / breathing helps, the muscles slackening like a dead marriage”). Alyan’s formal choices often invite and implicate the reader as co-creator, disrupting yet another boundary (as in the third of four interactive fictions, you choose: “the music / splits into a moon / and I dress myself by that light” or “Nadia tells me to open the curtain / and I dress myself by that light” or “God’s house begins to burn / and I dress myself by that light”). This book disrupts, and lingers long after reading. Get yourself a copy.
tiny ritual
Sometimes the energy centers of our own bodies can feel fractured, fragmented, out-of-orbit. Time to connect the dots. Grab a Sharpie (or something less permanent if you prefer). Draw a line on your own body, connecting your solar plexus (about a hand’s width above your navel) to your heart. Choose the color well. Make your line beautiful. As you draw, send a wish for yourself into your solar plexus and a wish for others into your heart. Take time throughout the day, especially when cleaning yourself, dressing or undressing, to gaze at the line and recall your wishes. Watch for signs of them coming true.
Writing prompt: On paper, or on an unexpected surface, draw a map linking your body to land that you’re intimately familiar with. Write a poem or manifesto or personal essay based on your drawing. Let some aspect of your drawing’s organization guide the organization of your writing.
upcoming workshops & offerings
Gift yourself gentle, nourishing, generative writing space with MAKE time. This June, we’ll meet communally, on Wednesdays. A note on this month’s image: my mom gave me an envelope recently with these paper dolls in it. When I was a kid, I really hated dolls. But my mom would lament to me how she never had a doll, or any toys, growing up. So when I was maybe 11 years old, I made these for her. I’d forgotten. But she saved them all these years, and now I have them back, and am sharing them with you.
Starting next month, join for the third round of Solar Year: An orbit for your book. This is my most special, durational offering for those of you working on, or dreaming of working on, your book. Let this group light up your energy & your commitment to create. See details, and what others are saying, here. Register by May 18 and receive a complimentary 45 minute 1-1 consultation on your work, as a bonus!
Ready to take steps towards meaningful internal and external change? Learn more about somatic creative coaching with me here.
Looking for a summer manuscript consultation? Check out testimonials, and get in contact here.
If you’re getting something out of these missives, you can show your appreciation through monetary support. Paid subscribers not only help me sustain the work of writing these monthly reviews and rituals, but also receive: access to the full archives and to bonus posts, a complimentary download with core somatic practices and creative writing prompts, access to Open Hours (affordable sliding-scale 1-1 sessions to discuss writing), and an invitation to optionally participate in one complimentary MAKE Time session in 2025.
news & upcoming events
Join us this Thursday evening for a celebratory reading by members of the very first Solar Year cohort!
I'm reading in Kingston, NY this Friday, May 16 at 6pm at the Fred J. Johnston House Garden (63 Main Street), along with Sampson Starkweather.
Register now for my DocuPoetry Lab, offered through the University of Chicago's Graham School for Continuing Education, this summer.
My friends are up to good things:
Cathy Linh Che’s second poetry collection Becoming Ghost is now
out. This collection took Che over ten years to complete, and shares the story of her parents' lives as Vietnam War refugees who were used as extras in the film Apocalypse Now.
Michelle Gurule’s debut memoir Thank you, John is now available for pre-order! Celia Laskey calls it "a compelling, darkly funny memoir about class, power, and sex work... Gurule is a captivating, charming narrator who has a quirkily lovable family open to both her queerness and her sex work. Your teeth will ache as you read this book, both with pain and with pleasure.”
sending love,
emily
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