trading objects & On The Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies

tiny ritual & poetry review, on each full moon

Apr 12, 2025

hello.

Greetings. It’s the first full moon of spring, and this one will be 2025’s farthest from earth (a micromoon!). The moon will look smaller, and feel more distant. Maybe it’s a good moment to consider the impact of added distance. I think of the years spent trying to unlearn things I’d been taught, things that felt harmful or restrictive or misleading. Unlearning is vital, and I’m grateful for the people, books and practices that pointed me in that direction. But distance reveals that there are also things worth relearning. For instance, uninterrupted focus, rather than visually microdosing everything on earth. For instance, the economies of childhood: sharing, trading, and imagining-into-existence. For instance, boredom that breeds world-building and play and joy and outright refusal and rebellion. Some kid stuff should not be outgrown, should not be left distant.

tiny review

Jennifer Nelson’s newest collection of poems, On The Way to the Paintings of Forest Robberies, winner of the 2024 Ottoline Prize in Poetry, is brilliant in its attentiveness (“Watch / the way a person contorts and you can see / the shape of what they keep under”). I feel invited to see with greater presence, greater openness to connections and to discord (“The world is dying, / and I would rather bathe in the disorganized / paint that clumps into discorded seeds, / not well mixed together, a dangerous / pornography, by which I mean a form / that destroys function”). This book is academic without worshipping at the altar of academia, and humane without worshipping humanity (“Everyone who sees me / wants to know where the humans are // and the answer is I’m a forest”). The collection moves from a Tenure Dossier to a Primordial Tide Pool, a perfect evolution for Nelson’s particular mind (“The papers say amnesia / is president of the Philippines…I miss the stupid octopus, / but I can be its legal heir / only outside the empire. / I am trusting it to find our home / beyond the reasonable horizon. / Beneath these clothes I bear its mark”). These poems stretch the reader beyond the paradigms of academia or tidal pool into a charged space where language is disturbingly accurate and imbued with power of generativity (“Everyone knows it’s impossible / to make God correctly beautiful and human / so why not gold / for bread and wine? Cissubstantiation’s / desperate”). Some moments feel like lockboxes opening, other moments feel like bliss, and others gutpunch with the violence of empire (“The helicopter / attempts innocence, suburban / calm, lawnmower of the sky, / blower of infoliate clouds, while we // do not quite riot, singing / about Palestine”). Identity is a thread throughout, but one that is clearly connected in the web of shared experience (“Imagine / propaganda so powerful two / thousand years later a child / of people born eight thousand / miles apart an average of twelve / thousand miles away is forced / to learn the empire’s language. / Not only that, I loved it”). While these often ekphrastic poems are cutting in their glare towards capital and empire (“I resist bad scholar listening / in the long afterlife / of displacement murder slaving / and their kids as if / there were learning without harm”), they are not didactic (“Why can’t I be claimed / by something coherent but not evil? / I tell the ghost I don’t believe / a message can be universal”). They lean into the primordial, into repetition as praxis (“There’s a trick, the trick that men / can use, the flip, / desire desires, / the gold wants me” ), reminding us that nothing is new but that some things may be remembered wrong. Somehow the poems, with their late-capital candor (“The original / workers’ compensation / is the sight of bounty / attiring the agents who keep it away”), remain wildly pleasurable (“a loom algorithm”), and grounded in deep compassion and care. Let these poems serve as portals, into the artworks they encounter, into historicity, into study of present times, into more generous readings of the self and leanings towards community.

tiny ritual

Objects are functional, fetishes, commodities, dust-collectors, individual altars, toys, tools, weapons, talismans. We are surrounded by them at most times, and take much of them for granted, despite sharing the same elemental makeup. To ritualize is to invite in profound change, and a tiny way to do this is to select an object that means something to you, and to lovingly trade it with or lend or give it to someone in your life. What are your associations with and attachments to the object? What do you know about the object’s origin and function? What might this object bring to its recipient and what are your intentions in giving/lending/trading? What does letting go mean to you these days? What does exchange mean to you, in this time? What does generosity mean to you? What can it open?

upcoming workshops & offerings

New workshop alert! We’ll collectively dive into revision as a creative, pleasurable, and affirming practice. Every other Wednesday, from 7-8:45pm/EST, starting this week, join me for ALTER. You’ll leave with five (or more!) completed poems, and a new approach to the art of revision. Bring your drafts, or start from scratch.
Looking for generative writing space? Gather for MAKE time each Tuesday morning in May, a little later than usual (hello, West Coast and late risers…)! Write from the soft space of mornings, in good company, with prompts that nurture and engage mind & body, and find inspiration in works by other artists. A gentle & process-oriented time to write, with optional sharing.
Give yourself the intentional space, attention, and support you need to move forward well on your creative projects. Using somatic coaching practices, I help private clients—primarily writers, artists, scholars, teachers, activists, and healers— listen more deeply to your intuition and desires, and take steps towards meaningful internal and external change, resulting in profound progress towards your goals. Learn more about somatic creative coaching with me here.
I offer reflective manuscript consultations, especially for poetry manuscripts (books, chapbooks, applications), artist books, and essays. Check out testimonials, and get in contact here. Booking now for spring and summer consultations.
If you’re getting something out of this monthly 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, and an invitation to optionally participate in one complimentary MAKE Time session this coming year.

news & upcoming events

I’ve got three poems in the new issue of Apartment Poetry, alongside work by Henry Goldkamp, Alyssa Perry, Varun Ravindran, Elizabeth Robinson, & Elise Thi Tran. Two were written in collaboration with meditation, and one’s about a real-life ghost encounter.
If you find yourself on Long Island on Saturday April 19, come through to the Curry Club in Port Jefferson. I’m hosting Spring Tides!
And on Sunday April 27, you’re invited to the No, Dear chapbook launch at Kissa Kissa in Brooklyn! Come celebrate first collections by Yagmur Akyürek, Zoë Bodzas, & Ahmed Zaid!
My friends are up to good things:
- Jennifer Mackenzie’s newly published second poetry collection, Pain Survey, “plumbs queer desire and strips American necropolitics down…In lyric reportage from across Istanbul, Damascus, Beirut, and New York City, the book finds the ghosts of other imperial exploits haunting this century's ‘forever wars’.”
- Allyson Paty’s first full-length collection, Jalousie, is now available from Tupelo Press! In it, you’ll find “a deliciously sharp perspective which at times ranges from being seen literally through partially-opened slats, the world at a slant, to confronting the mediations of how we tender our communications, representations of self, labor, and love.”

sending love,

emily

emilybrandt.com