Amorak Huey

Hokusai’s The Wave business card with River River Books sitting on Editor Han’s poetry bookshelf

Cute little business cards / we will also have stickers of this design at AWP!

Aha! Behold, your Friday AWP offsite plans just dropped:
bsky.app/profile/rive...
Thanks @riverriverbooks.bsky.social

RIVER RIVER BOOKS AT AWP - T756 • Author signings with J.D. Ho, Preeti Vangani, Jennifer A Sutherland, Jameela F. Dallis, Elizabeth Sylvia, Zoe Ryder White, Beth Gilstrap, and friend of the press Burgi Zenhaeusern! • Friday night reading with Blair, 7-9pm, University Baltimore • Saturday night Anti-Fascist Love Poem reading, 7-9pm, 1640 Thames Street use 1636 entrance) RIVERRIVERBOOKS.ORG

Reading Poster. Text: BLAIR & RIVER RIVER BOOKS FRIDAY NIGHT READING (3/6) 7-9PM 21 W MT ROYAL AVE BALTIMORE, MD 21201 Featuring: JAMEELA F. DALLIS CELESTE DOAKS BETH GILSTRAP J.D. HO CYNTHIA MANICK ELIZABETH SYLVIA JENNIFER A SUTHERLAND ZOË RYDER WHITE PREETI VANGANI & SPECIAL GUEST sponsored by: KLEIN FAMILY CENTER OF COMMUNICATION DESIGN

We are readying for AWP (T756), and couldn’t be more excited about our Friday night offsite reading with @blairpub.bsky.social at University of Baltimore! 📚💙🎉🎉 Hope you can join us!

riverriverbooks.org/store/

“We should learn to speak in a language that rich people who don’t dream can’t comprehend.”

I seek and desire Sappho translated from the ancient Greek by Bliss Carman I seek and desire, Even as the wind That travels the plain And stirs in the bloom Of the apple-tree. I wander through life, With the searching mind That is never at rest, Till I reach the shade Of my lover’s door.

SELF-PORTRAIT WITH PRAYING MANTIS At Scull Creek in Fayetteville, Arkansas Moments after the sky declares the rain absent, it begins falling roughly through the leaves. I miss you, and worse, I want to say it the way another poet would. The creek is green-gold, the water moving around stones and slabs of concrete. I walk loudly through it, feel it wrap around my ankles. Last night, at a motel in Sallisaw, I watched a row of pale blue doors lean into sunset, like words in an aching sentence. My shame is that I didn't believe you, not fully. Beneath the rippling surface, there's stillness, clear and cold, where tiny glinting fish form patterns only to dissolve them.

I miss you,/and worse, I want to say it the way another poet would.

-Chloe Honum, from The Lantern Room

My friend recently attended a funeral, and midway through the eulogy, he became convinced that it had been written by AI. There was the telltale proliferation of abstract nouns, a surfeit of assertions that the deceased was "not just X—he was Y" coupled with a lack of concrete anecdotes, and more appearances of the word collaborate than you would expect from a rec-league hockey teammate. It was both too good, in terms of being grammatically correct, and not good enough, in terms of being particular. My friend had no definitive proof that he was listening to AI, but his position—and I agree with him—is that when you know, you know. His sense was that he had just heard a computer save a man from thinking about his dead friend.

You can’t offload emotional labor. Believe me, I’ve tried

Five questions with your truly

Heaven help me if I ever meet someone in person who claims to be an AI author. I have a glass face. I cannot pretend. I will do my trademark cackle and then just snicker uncontrollably for a while. Do you let the plagiarism robot kiss your lover? Look at sunsets for you? Why are you even alive?

Five Questions with Author Beth Gilstrap On liminal spaces, making connections, decay, and rebirth

“I followed these images into story, into my own devastation, and into noticing the small moments of beauty I clung to for dear life.”

Beth Gilstrap / @bettysueblue.bsky.social

One of the best takeaways from my presence on this platform is poets and small presses that connect me to exceptional writing -- and, times being what they are, that sustain a positive connection to America and Americans. Thank you for your work -- I will be buying the whole lot 📚

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You're not producing a novel with AI. You're using an algorithm powered by other people's stolen novels to lie and pretend you're a writer. Being a writer requires WRITING, you pathetic fucks.

I cannot say this enough: there is NO middle ground when it comes to writing and AI. Anyone who uses AI to write and admits it should be loudly shamed, hideously embarrassed, paraded through the streets of shun until they flee writing forever

We have seven books coming out this month: five poetry titles and two in our new Plainwater Nonfiction Series.

What we do is small. It’s not scalable. It’s not replicable by a generative LLM. It’s born out of love for our authors and joy in the work.

Your orders and support sustain us. 🙏💙🌊

I want to say this about J.D.’s book as well, as a lover of books broadly about place and nature, etc, as many of you are—this one will surprise you and stay with you, both for its substance and style.

This just shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how to do news. Data helps, but data doesn’t tell a reporter to spend a years-long investigation into child labor or an editor to place staff in a country on the brink of war. What exactly does Bezos think WaPo’s “journalistic mission” is?

I'm going to win.

love the writer, love the press, can't wait for this beautiful book...

It’s here! In one of its fields of origin. So grateful to @riverriverbooks.bsky.social for giving The Visible Field a home.

Every instance of "AI democratizes the arts, you're classist and ableist and a gatekeeper for trying to stop it" is a slap in the face to the literally centuries of poor, disabled people making art on the margins and a crass lie in service of a machine that strips down and regurgitates dreams

This book is transformative. Order it now.

Friends, it’s so good.

Book cover: black background with a rusty fish can, the kind with a key on the top you roll back, opened. Title font and author name in gradient white font. A light striking the can and font.

GOOD MORNING, COVER REVEAL! Our final spring cover is here! Nonfiction & so striking. Welcome to Backyard Alchemy, on life with other creatures in a time of salvage by J.D. Ho, design by @alban-fischer.bsky.social. @nematode.bsky.social 📚💙🎉

You can preorder here: riverriverbooks.org/store/-Preor...

Every time I get a new email about the Anthropic class action settlement I just want to fucking cry because it's a reminder that I (and a ton of other writers) have been excluded from even having this tiny crumb of justice because our publishers didn't take the extra step of registering copyright.

A blue and green bookmark on a stack of blue books (accident!) and beside a wine glass, more books stacked behind. The bookmark has the text: "WHO COULD BLAME THE RIVER FOR ITS SMALL REBELLIONS?" J.D. HO BACKYARD ALCHEMY

Opened a beautiful new box of bookmarks last night! 🌙 With a quote from JD Ho’s Backyard Alchemy. You’ll be able to find both at @riverriverbooks.bsky.social’s table at AWP Baltimore next month 📚💙

Excellent use of research skills & historical context & what art from a particular moment suggests about what's possible in that moment --

Seven double-walled shipping boxes of poetry books, newly arrived from Bookmobile. Sitting in front of my poetry shelves, on tan carpet.

I am not feeling well and BLESS the teen and their muscles for lifting the poetry boxes tonight, delivered after—checks my auntie’s notes—pumpkin time.

@riverriverbooks.bsky.social

Can’t wait to open these tomorrow! 📚💙

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Loving Public School Poetry contributor Amorak Huey's new collection, Mouth!