Alison Kinney

United States of Rejection This is a love-hate story about personal and political relationships in the United States, told through the intimate stories of both the rejectors and the re...

Now is the time to pre-order the new @alisonkinney.bsky.social book, United States of Rejection.

online and in real life
bc there's my body
and then there's your body,
and I don't think anybody's
coming over tonight."

Keeps rum rumming It's
summer, I think, and I hate
nature bc every poem
is like Poplars and Bunch
Grasses and Peonies
and shit, but the East River
is ambling outside my window
like holding hands
with Stevie Nicks:
so beautiful right, but also
deafening, and kinda
scary, and I feel small

I especially loved this section pointing to his next book:
"There is a barb of feathers
caught in the February
of my throat. It's summer,
I think. The bird
calls in my belly vibrate
to smoke, and snuff.
I want to be normal
enough to fuck. Muse
stops texting,
the B43 hits a pothole

Cover of Tommy Pico's IRL with award stickers and photo collage portrait?

Having loved Tommy Pico's NATURE POEM, I went back to read his first book, IRL. I highlighted so many moments (odyssey across Williamsburg, horrid bar conversation, Brooklyn backyard fireworks party that yields moonwalking and his grandmother and the residential schools).

A rough, bright pastel sketch of trump from a video, mouth open, palms out, probably saying something about Portland burning, as the inflatable-suit frog from the Portland ICE protests looms up close behind him.

Was painting. Got sidetracked by pastels and kaiju.

With that said, if you want to be reminded that the two little serviceberry trees in your backyard are not only vibrant and alive, but also part of a whole community in which you're participating, you'll be glad. Thanks as always to Quinn who introduced me to Kimmerer's work!

For those who haven't read her work yet, start with one of the full-length books! SERVICEBERRY is an expansion of her thoughts on Indigenous-led environmental stewardship, anti-capitalism, and gift economy, but it's building on, not introducing.

Kimmerer's BRAIDING SWEETGRASS is the book that's made the most profound change in the past ten years of my life, shifting me from a passive to engaged environmentalist, causing me to start working on rebuilding my own built environment, and inspiring me to start my plant biology classes.

"It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world. Windigo thinking jeopardizes the survival of the community by incentivizing individual accumulation far beyond the satisfaction of 'enoughness.'"

"The Indigenous philosophy of the gift economy, based in our responsibility to pass on those gifts, has no tolerance for creating artificial scarcity through hoarding. In fact, the 'monster' in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little....

cover of Robin Wall Kimmerer's book the serviceberry: ecru rough paper with illustration of cedar waxwings eating ripe berries on branches.

I thought I'd posted about reading Robin Wall Kimmerer's THE SERVICEBERRY, but I hadn't, so just in time for Indigenous Peoples' Day, here was the first book I read this past summer, as soon as I could rest from other obligations!

"To stretch as far as I can go and relish what is satisfying rather than what is sad. Building a strong and elegant pathway toward transition."

"But in their place, another kind of power is growing, tempered and enduring, grounded within the realities of what I am in fact doing. An open-eyed assessment and appreciation of what I can and do accomplish, using who I am and who I most wish myself to be.

"Living with cancer has forced me to consciously jettison the myth of omnipotence, of believing—or loosely asserting—that I can do anything, along with any dangerous illusion of immortality. Neither of these unscrutinized defenses is a solid base for either political activism or personal struggle.

I also wanted them to be able to recognize and critique the co-optation of self-care for capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy, divorcing it from community, service, and action. Lorde's vision of self-care was: "I am saving my life by using my life in the service of what must be done."

cover of "A Burst of Light and Other Essays," a color drawing portrait of Audre Lorde

Today in book joy: For years I've been assigning Audre Lorde's epilogue to her collection, A BURST OF LIGHT AND OTHER ESSAYS; I wanted my students to know who first defined self-care--"Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare."

The Sinister Reason Trump Is Itching to Invoke the Insurrection Act An authoritarian’s dream, the Insurrection Act is ripe for abuse — and Trump’s Cabinet is already setting up his justification to use it.

It’s tempting to urge protesters to avoid giving Trump a pretext for escalation. That would be a grave mistake. @theintercept.com theintercept.com/2025/10/07/t...

Eggs. Pencils. Undershirts of very soft cotton.
Ribbons. Radios. Shining flashlights.
Handmade clay plates. Chocolates. Really soft pillows.
Baskets. Bracelets. Running shoes."

or nicer? I have no idea. But sometimes I wonder what
38 billion dollars could buy, instead of weapons aimed
against us and this is what comes to mind:

"It’s hard to grasp very big numbers and distant concepts.
Like imagining what all our thoughts might have been
if we lived 300 years ago. Would they be centered
on a goat or six rocks piled together
or would they be wide as they are now?
In those long-ago days,
would people be meaner to one another

"Why can't they see
how beautiful we are?

The saddest part?
We all could have had
twice as many friends."

If you can keep reading after that, then there's this, a reminder that the systemic denigration and devaluation of Palestinian people's lives began long before the most recent war.

Book cover for Naomi Shihab Nye's THE TINY JOURNALIST: POEMS: an impressionistic cityscape, maybe Mediterranean, maybe, who knows, Texan?

Today in book joy (and heartbreak): It's hard to choose among all the heartbreaks in Naomi Shihab Nye's 2019 THE TINY JOURNALIST. In the poem "Janna," "At 7, making videos. /At 10, raising the truth flag," Nye writes in the voice of the eponymous tiny journalist:

"This is my motherhood legacy.
"I will never be a mother. But I will always be my grandmother's child."

"She encouraged my writing long before I ever published a single word. Granny taught me compassion and how to care for others--whether I birthed them or not; whether they are related to me by blood or not. Her mothering prepared me to mother her when she developed Alzheimer's disease.

"Granny knew me well, even the parts of me I didn't discuss with her.... She didn't try to scare me into motherhood by telling me I'd regret not having children and wouldn't have anyone to care for me when I'm old. Instead, she championed my educational and professional goals....

Savage's memoirs are embedded within clear-eyed arguments and assessments of power, self-definition, and world-building. She makes the work possible through her exact and exacting literary and ethical sensibilities, which she expresses through the equally hard work of complicated love.

Today in book joy:
When I finally read Jodi Savage's essay collection THE DEATH OF A JAYBIRD this summer, I was struck over and over by the craft. The entire work is incisive, witty, unflinchingly honest, and just as unflinchingly, deeply compassionate, without a trace of sentimentality.

and promised to write, even though we knew we never would, silver mirrors given to us by our mothers, whose last words still rang in our ears. You will see: women are weak, but mothers are strong."

dolls we had slept with since we were five, bags of brown sugar with which to buy favors, bright cloth quilts, paper fans, English phrase books, flowered silk sashes, smooth black stones from the river that ran behind our house, a lock of hair from a boy we had once touched, and loved...