Bookninja

I’m going to word this carefully, without consideration to the worth or skill of any piece shortlisted and with great respect to all involved: I am glad to see this award go to an emerging poet working in the trenches of student-hood– Alycia Pirmohamed. I may have an unpopular opinion on contests like this and who they’re for (IE, not award-winning tenured professors with major salaries).

“Here is a poet who ‘pours and pours’ the whole world inside a single sentence. A poet who puts a sentence under a sentence to build a world,” the jury said in a statement. “There is a biographical depth in Love Poem with Elk and Punctuation, Prairie Storm and Tasbih that gives expression to a narrative yearning that is immediately felt — so much so that to read on is to get to the heart of the lyric mode. There is an unwavering confidence here, a quiet playfulness, and an ear for unpredictable images and symbols, all of which suggest to us that this is a poet to watch, from whom we may learn, in their diction, ‘how to symmetry, how to pray.'”

Note: I have no idea what that jury citation actually means, but I’m keen to read the piece!

Imagine being the guy who snapped the pic of Donald Trump’s all-caps notes, just shy of being written in crayon and with capital I-s that look like toppled H-s, yesterday. Well, this is him.

The notes say so much, less about what Trump said or Sondland testified—the ambassador stated explicitly before Congress that Ukraine had been subject to a quid pro quo—than how he views himself in this moment. “THE FINAL WORD FROM THE PRES OF THE U.S.” sounds more like a dictum from the great and powerful Oz than from a democratically elected leader. The misspelling of Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky’s name betrays a casual disregard for even the most basic facts of the matter. And the giant lettering supports the operating theory that Trump refuses to wear glasses that he sorely needs.

The public would have none of that additional insight without Wilson’s photograph. “I am always trying to take a picture that no one else has,” he said. “As news consumers, we tend to see the same images from press conferences day after day, and sometimes situations arise that allow me to use my expertise to take a picture that is really quite unique and different.”

Bookninja favourite Simon Armitage, pictured here very much not wanting his photo taken, talks about the return to nature poetry.

“It’s come about because of the obvious environmental concerns, and in recognition of this growing body of work in poetry addressing climate change and the climate crisis, sometimes directly and sometimes more indirectly,” says Armitage. “It needs more awareness around it. I also think that offering a prize might encourage more of this sort of writing.”

This is making my palms sweaty. Better scroll back today to have a looksee at what I wrote way back on page 1.

The first line can be a beast to get right whether you’re composing a dating profile or drafting a workplace pitch – but when it comes to longform fiction, the stakes are vertiginous. Think of all that goes into writing a novel, from conception to final edit and beyond; then picture a prospective reader, besieged by competing demands from rival books, never mind films and binge-worthy boxsets. Imagine next that reader miraculously reaching for our author’s work, scanning its jacket blurb, opening the cover…

This writer, who I believe just won an NBA last night for non-fiction, rambles (eloquently) about rambling (eloquently). This is something I needed to read today, he said, looking down the double-barrelled shotgun of chapter 11.

The unfinished work is no less real, or necessary, or powerful than the book. How we need it, this work, these long, beautiful digressions, these surprises. May we continue to gift writers with the time for wildness. May they ramble, digress, go beyond the edges of all the known and touted maps, may they hew close to the question, to unearth the questions beyond.

Note: not a basketball post. The National Book Awards went last night. Twitter is a soup of people live tweeting it. Anyway, here’s a long story shortened: the winners. I like Sze’s poetry and I heard the Choi is good.

Well, now that the Giller is gone by, we’re back to regular Canadian book news: kittens who live in a bookstore. (Listen, it was either that or the latest guy we all used to like who turns out to be a predator.)

When I was starting out, we were pretty careful to not write political poems. But that might be a Gen X thing, more than a poetry thing. Here, what changed the poet soldiers of that generation are examined.

Clearly, the combination of loneliness and sense of betrayal that so many of these poets experienced was a central component of their work. As Ehrhart described, “each soldier went to Vietnam alone and unheralded, and those who survived came home alone to an alien land—indifferent or even hostile to them—where the war continued to rage no farther away than the nearest television set or newspaper, or the nearest street demonstration.”

This short opinion essay’s title gets right to it: Sadly, I Like Reading Books on My Phone Now. Personally, I still can’t, though last year I bought a tablet in anticipation of the day I’ll need to size up the font to be able to read it. (I swear, my mother-in-law’s phone shows like one word at a time, they’re so zoomed.) Listen, as an early generation nerd, I have been sitting in front of computer screens since about 1982. My eyes are tired, man. Tired. So I’ll stick with paper as long as I’m able. Anyway, all this is to say that I fall asleep within two paragraphs even when reading paper, so I think it’s more about age than medium.

When I was a kid I used to read for five or six hours straight without incident, except for having to get up to pee or get a snack, but now I can’t seem to make it more than 20 minutes without falling asleep. I love to read, and I’m very worried about reading enough books before I die, so this bothers me a lot.

Tweets and emojis are seeping into and changing our fiction like microplastics swirling in your baby’s bloodstream for a future condition we haven’t yet diagnosed. Happy Wednesday. (Ferrante and Knausgaard analysis in here for those inclined to skip anything with the word “emoji” in the headline.)

…who could contest the idea that communications, behind a ceaseless inflow of data, have been continually evolving to target ever more primitive brain functions? Think of the obscurely nauseous casino ping of tugging downward on Instagram and seeing it refresh with a notification, the instant dopamine rush. The scroll and the ideogram died out because of their simplicity, only to have been revived for that reason. The scroll is a frictionless waterfall on the screen. And while an entire alphabet of ideograms would be unusably bulky, a handful of key ones, scattered into our language, condense thousands of complicated reactions into a few dozen universal symbols.