Reuben Gelley Newman

This Friday, a free @sarabandebooks.bsky.social zine workshop for yr lunch hour. My heart in that postscript. 🖤 We will wander through John Berger, little birds, and Rosa Luxembourg to write a p.s. zine. Register below. Come do words with me.

us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

"Baker & Taylor will be closing their business, after a planned acquisition of their assets by Readerlink fell through last month. Operations will cease by January 1, according to online posts from former employees. Employees were informed yesterday that their positions will be eliminated. A local newspaper in Illinois reports that 253 of the 318 staffers at the 379,000-square-foot distribution center in Momence were let go immediately, as 62 others will stay on to assist with "wind[ing] down" the business until late December, with the last three employees departing January 3. A report from Illinois' Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act explained that the closure is due to the termination of the Readerlink sale, which "would have resulted in the continuing employment of all Baker & Taylor employees." "Despite Baker & Taylor’s subsequent efforts, it was unsuccessful in seeking a path to continue its business operations," the report continues. B&T was the largest supplier of materials to libraries, and B&T Publisher Services distributes books from more than 250 small presses. Small publishers are particularly in need of distribution services after the closure of Small Press Distribution. B&T did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company is headquartered in Charlotte, NC."

A depressing update we've seen coming for a long time, with numerous impacts. Namely, even less competition for library acquisitions and wholesale, publishers (including Hub City) left with unpaid bills, and small presses left high and dry, and vanishing distribution options.

I love this Alina!!

"It might ask instead:

Why lower the rarefied
to regular volume?

Why refashion the sacred
into a vibeless ornament?"

🪩

DOTS EVERYWHERE I erased my legs and forgot to draw in the stilts. It looks like I’m floating but I’m not floating. Sometimes I draw you with fangs. I tell you these things because I love you. Some people paint with whiskey and call it social drinking. Some people paint drunk and put dots of color everywhere. In the morning the dots make them happy. I am putting dots of color everywhere and you are sleeping. Something has happened in the paint tonight and it is worth keeping. It’s nothing like I thought it would be and closer to what I meant. None of it is real, darling. I say it to you. Maybe we will wake up singing. Maybe we will wake up to the silence of shoes at the foot of the bed not going anywhere.

Richard Siken

Never misses!

I second this emotion.

Aww I really appreciate it :))

Thanks so much!!!

Message for Jim in Syria [Fall fell wind-wise] Fall fell wind-wise today— / trembles of dried lilac stalks, dead

Gutted by today's gorgeous poem.
I recommend watching the documentary "Jim: The James Foley Story." I believe it's available on HBO, Prime, Pluto... I wasn't familiar with David Roderick till today. I look forward to reading his next book.
poets.org/poem/message...

When Adoption Promises Are Broken Many birth mothers hope to maintain contact with their child. But their agreements with adoptive parents can be fragile.

If you want to understand open adoption, it makes sense to start with birth parents—yet studies of them are few. 2+ yrs ago, I began talking w/ birth mothers to try to understand what living in an open adoption is like for them, and what rights or options they might have if challenges were to arise.

www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Icymi :)

From the NYT: “The White House on Wednesday sent letters to nine of the nation's top public and private universities, urging campus leaders to pledge support for President Trump's political agenda to help ensure access to federal research funds.”

University presidents it’s time for a united front. I mean, it’s past time. What are you going to do.

Thanks so much!!!

Great closing lines!

A cover for exquisites volume 5, with text on letter beads and a cyanotype of leaves as the image

Reuben Gelley Newman Enharmonic From the high island of his mind the boy attempts to whistle, to coax air at such speed, his lips at such curve, as to suggest pitch-a task he has failed at all his life-and with it to summon the languid dog of his dreams, who waits by the kitchen counter, begging for chicken stew, which he cannot give because in this incarnation he cannot cook, or eat, or sleep, or hold another man, or tether himself to anything but song-but that is not enough to live on-he cannot subsist on even the steadiest drone set from the accordion, nor the swell of a major triad, nor an array of intervals strung like lights between the trees, fluttering fifths, sevenths, octaves, tenths-not even a luminescent cluster of pitches so close as to be almost the same: less than a half step, not yet a quarter tone, mere cents apart, and to think that once he wanted another man to reside as closely on this scale with him, their frequencies not just sympathetic but identical-he whistles, weakly, after a surfeit of soundless air. The dog looks but does not come.

NEW POEM in the exquisites reading series anthology 💙

If any other president in all of history said the military should use American cities as a training ground he would be removed from office that same day. The hardest thing to tolerate in all this is how relatively silent elected democrats are. It’s ridiculous.

Lovely!!

Send me your students’ poems! 🌸💫📖

Nomination details at link below.

perfect. this is it.

ai is a political project, arguing about its usefulness as an office tool misses the point

Gonna keep saying this until ppl are willing to sit with it: a Democratic Party that is anti-abortion and anti-trans is a direct result of the willingness of its members to exclude disabled ppl and Palestinians. This is an evolution of the decision to shut out the most marginalized

Good Riddance To ‘The Best American Poetry’ | Defector When David Lehman, a poet then working as a book critic for Newsweek, proposed the project for The Best American Poetry anthology, he was searching for a national platform. His first anthology project...

It's the end of The Best American Poetry.

I wrote about the forty-year anthology project, poetry’s place in Big Five publishing, and editor David Lehman's culture wars vision of American verse.

defector.com/good-riddanc...

Good Riddance To ‘The Best American Poetry’ | Defector When David Lehman, a poet then working as a book critic for Newsweek, proposed the project for The Best American Poetry anthology, he was searching for a national platform. His first anthology project...

defector.com/good-riddanc...

Institutions work tacitly to produce consensus. In the case of The Best American Poetry, that consensus is reinforced through a circumscribed roster of poets and publications whose prestige serves to filter the series editor's culture wars within the trusted colophon of a Big Five publisher. Poetry's aesthetic variousness, radical discontinuities, and political efficacy are smoothed over into a marketable narrative of the genre's ongoing resurgence in the face of difficult odds. The anthology's profits are spent to sustain poetry's corporate shine, legitimating Lehman's reactionary ideology as apolitical orthodoxy. This is the production of the mainstream.

Great article by @nicksturm.bsky.social in
@defector.com on Best American Poetry's reactionary legacy

"some legal experts have called it a crime to summarily execute civilians" says today's New York Times, continuing their long tradition of whitewashing fascism

Absolute all-timer sentence in today's @nytimes.com

It's happening in libraries too......

Assata Shakur, fugitive Black activist who escaped life sentence for killing police officer, dies in Cuba In her telling, and in the minds of her supporters, she was pursued for crimes she didn't commit or that were justified. The FBI put Shakur on its list of “most wanted terrorists.”

Assata Shakur, a Black liberation activist who was given political asylum in Cuba after her 1979 escape from a U.S. prison where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a police officer, has died, her daughter and the Cuban government said. https://to.pbs.org/3IwhDqC