What We've Been Reading

Brad:
I'm reading Nice Hat. Thanks.,a book of collaborative poems by Joshua Beckman and Matthew Rohrer. It's an older book (it was published in 2002) that I'm just getting around to. It's perfect for summer -- humorous, fleet, leaving you with positive impressions like a day at the beach.

I'm also reading Fort Red Border,the first book of poems by Kiki Petrosino. The title is an anagram for Robert Redford, who appears in the first third of the book, interacting with Petrosino's speaker and framing inquiries into topics such as ethnicity and heritage. If you are in the Twin Cities, she'll be reading at Magers and Quinn on September 12 at 7 pm with (ahem) a poetry editor at InDigest.

Reina:
I just finished reading Surfacingby Margaret Atwood. One of my close friends could not stop praising it, and when I found out that Margaret Atwood is a humanist (a system of thought I've been curious to learn more about recently), I requested my friend's note-laden, dog-eared, and underlined copy, which she readily passed to me with both hands like a treasured object. Unfortunately, I do not feel the same way toward the book as she does. The story of a young woman returning home again after a long and painful absence was told well enough, heavy with symbolism and addressing issues such as sexism, patriotism, and humanity's altogether destructive nature, but it just didn't resonate within me like I had hoped. Still, I haven't given up on Atwood, and I plan to read her more popular novel, The Blind Assassinsome day soon enough.

Dustin:
This past week or so I read two novels that I'm not going to talk about, yet. They aren't out, but both are by past InDigest contributors, and both were quite spectacular. I don't want to ruin it because I'm sure I'll be talking about them a lot soon.

But this week I also read Ada Limón's new chapbook What Sucks Us In Will Surely Swallow Us Whole. It's a collection poems that sort of narrates a road trip through California, but it's less direct than I'm making it sound. It doesn't have a trajectory necessarily, but all the poems are about this road trip and what it means or how it changes people, makes us come to new realizations about people and places. Limón has a really great fashion of creating new images out things that are familiar, or turning intangibles into a digestible image. One of my favorite lines does just that, "She thinks she could go farther / faster without the drag of what she carries; / nothing but her body's own quiet / insistence to accelerate." It's really quite beautiful, not just the words but the book itself is. It's out through Cinematheque Press, a press I've only recently discovered - and have been ingesting everything I can get from rapidly - (I read from Joshua Marie Wilkinson's newest collection, out through Cinematheque, at the last 1207 reading). They make some really great little books, giving great attention to detail and what design elements will really add to the book. They do a fantastic job, I recommend going and buying some of their extremely affordable books.