hello.
I recently returned more fully to a classical hatha practice that’s been a part of my life since the early 2000s. The teacher, the sequence, the exact phrasing of instruction has changed little, but the changes feel wise, intentional. A practice worth keeping, even as everything is always changing. My body knows and remembers this practice well, but I haven’t done it fastidiously since before the pandemic. My body feels different. I’ve changed. The world continues to change. I used to measure the long holds of poses by how bad or good it felt in my body. The paradigm is different now. I think about freedom. How free does my body feel to soften, to succumb to gravity, to trust? I didn’t consider or expect such profound change in such a steady practice. So much motion inside of stillness.
tiny review
Alex Cuff’s first poetry collection, Common Amnesias, recently released by Ugly Duckling Presse, moves its lens between the state, the family, and the bowels (“My large intestine has stopped absorbing nutrients so I’m sweating into a magnesium bath / I meditate on the intersection between the collective amnesia of settler colonialism // And my own failure to retain what I learn”), which are, as she shows us, as sentient as the heart and mind (“Once when I lay down loudly for too long / My therapist prescribed medication / She said I was leaky / I was leaking but not through any orifice just psychically / I was awash in slippery fluids but my holes were paper dry”). Cuff’s poems embrace the mundanity and pleasure of the body, and absolutely delight with their unexpected, often hilarious turns (“When a man says without prompting just because I’m a guy, doesn’t mean I’m an idiot I don’t respond. / Suddenly I have systems”). The poems are generous, and rigorously thoughtful (“I mistake privilege for symptoms”). They relish in talking about all the things (“the hairdresser takes my hair in her hands like it’s a limp dick / asks how long since I washed it”) Cuff was taught in the 80s not to (“My family did not discuss feelings / But my mother would often ask / About my movements / ‘How are your bowels?’ she’d say / In a tone of near accusation”). Mostly, this collection finds poetry and beauty in the gross (“from the lake the only flowers are the umbrellas on shore / And my small brain flower and the warm piss between my legs floral”). We are collectively better because of this book.
tiny ritual
I wrote, last autumn, about planting garlic. As I do, I forgot all about the garlic (and about the post). And then, there it is - the garlic, coming up, surrounded by other life, still taking shape and girth in the dirt. I’ve been taught to pull those weeds, to “make room.” But I rarely have the heart to kill. How else to make room? When the weeds stay put, the room made is inside myself - new room in the mind. Room to ask, so what? Room to observe how things grow. My ritual this moon-cycle is to pause and observe my impulse to destroy and to ask instead: how can I make room? What wisdom in no action? What else is possible? What will grow if you let it?
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Writing prompt: Spend time with something (living, or metaphoric) that you’ve planted. How do you feel towards each other? Listen closely. Then write.
offerings & news
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Alex Crowley, t’ai freedom ford, and I finished editing the newest No, Dear. Issue 31: DESCENT launches at 2pm on Sunday June 2 at Blinky’s in Brooklyn. Hope to see you there!
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My friends are up to good things:
Black Meme: A History of the Images that Make Us by Legacy Russell is out now. Russell explores the “meme” as mapped to Black visual culture from 1900 to the present, arguing that without the contributions of Black people, digital culture would not exist in its current form.
Stacy Skolnik’s debut novel The Ginny Suite releases on May 31st. The book takes place in a present-future where a mysterious global syndrome is affecting women, causing symptoms of submissiveness and aphasia. In the age of misinformation, AI, and surveillance technology, The Ginny Suite asks how much—and who—we’re willing to sacrifice in the name of progress.
“The Humbling or Chapter of Mama: Part 1,” featuring Cori Kresge, is a critical reflection on the joys and challenges of being a mother and a working artist. The stage is shared by five dancers as well as creator Esmé Boyce’s child and husband and the children and husband of another dancer in the work. This piece embraces chaos as choreographic material. It is a demand that one not be forced to choose between motherhood and an art career. May 26th at Arts on Site, 12 St Marks Place, NYC, 12:30pm or 2:30pm. June 15th at Riverdale Presbyterian Church Gym, 4765 Henry Hudson Pkwy, Bronx, 11am + 5pm.
Rachel Bennet’s debut full-length poetry collection, Mothers & Other Fairytales, draws on folkloric images and themes to map the absence of a mother in the poet's life, and the poet herself becoming a mother.
Lynn Melnick writes: “This book reads like a novel in its narrative propulsion but lands as all good poetry lands, right at the heart.”
sending love,
emily