Poem for Earth Day. From Matthew Olzmann's book, Constellation Route. (Alice James Books, 2022)

matthew olzmann, mountain dew commercial disguised as a love poem

Matthew Olzmann

favourite poems of october

joseph brodsky collected poems in english, 1972-1999: “the hawk’s cry in autumn”

natalie diaz it was the animals

ruth stone as real as life

muriel rukeyser the collected poems of muriel rukeyser: “käthe kollwitz”

naomi shihab nye grape leaves: a century of arab american poetry: “making a fist”

larry levis elegy: “elegy with a chimneysweep falling inside it”

emily berry arlene and esme

erika meitner copia: “yizker bukh”

aracelic girmay sister was the wolf

joshua beckham take it: “[dark mornings shown thy mask]”

dana levin you will never get death / out of your system

delmore schwartz summer knowledge: selected poems (1938-1958): “darkling summer, ominous dusk, rumorous rain”

matthew olzmann mountain dew commercial disguised as a love poem

ghazal (@dobaara) my anger and loneliness are lovers

nikki allen search party: names for my mother

ellora sutton (newborn)

emily skaja letter to s, hospital

benjamín naka-hasebe kingsley born year of the uma

hieu minh nguyen litany for the animals who run from me

brandy nālani mcdougall he mele aloha no ka niu

ai vice: new and selected poems: “cuba, 1962″

gig ryan civil twilight

troy osaki o heat we protest

nick carbó andalusian dawn: “directions to my imaginary childhood”

chen chen i’m not a religious person but

sally wen mao oculus: “anna may wong stars as cyborg #86″

srikanth reddy voyager: “book three: 19″

golden & when they come for me (reprise)

natalie scenters-zapico notes on my present: a contrapuntal

evan knoll blood makes the blade holy

jesús papolete meléndez hey yo! yo soy!: 40 years of nuyorician street poetry a bilinguial edition: “of a butterfly in el barrio or a stranger in paradise”

kofi

University of Akron Press

"Tell me what it’s like to live without / curiosity, without awe."

Read it here | Reblog for a larger sample size!

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

by Matthew Olzmann

Tell me what it’s like to live without

curiosity, without awe. To sail

on clear water, rolling your eyes

at the kelp reefs swaying

beneath you, ignoring the flicker

of mermaid scales in the mist,

looking at the world and feeling

only boredom. To stand

on the precipice of some wild valley,

the eagles circling, a herd of caribou

booming below, and to yawn

with indifference. To discover

something primordial and holy.

To have the smell of the earth

welcome you to everywhere.

To take it all in, and then,

to reach for your knife.

top 5 books of 2023

i read many less books (for fun at least) than i read last year but it was really nice to do this kind of post for 2022 so i'm repeating for 2023

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1. the idiot - elif batuman - making a reappearance from last year ... i know many people don't like to count rereads in their top books of the year since they weren't new favorites but for the impact this book had on me this year i simply couldn't omit it. i read this no less than 3 times in 2023 ... it became so much more relatable and painful than it was upon first read in 2022 and instantly became my current favorite book of all time. not a day passes that i do not think about this. stunning, meandering character study about a floundering 18/19 year old who is, unfortunately, in all the best and worst ways, the fictional character that most represents myself. i have already done 10x my share of pr work for this book on this account so i will leave the review here. but please read this.

2. contradictions in the design - matthew olzmann - almost dethroned siken's crush as my favorite poetry collection ... the tumblr girls will understand how serious this is. absolutely gorgeous. i teared up at a solid 50% of the poems. contains countless life altering lines and a really profound mixture of the abstract and the concrete, the general/philosophical and the specific/mundane. love.

3. when the emperor was divine - julie otsuka - quick read with deceptively simple prose that's absolutely drenched with symbolism. demands to be read with a highlighter in hand and a murder wall behind you to decipher each iteration of each motif. under 200 pages but you could easily spend weeks trying to pull everything out of it. just on a craft level this is absolutely sublime, fiction at its finest.

4. fun home - allison bechdel - this is of course one of the graphic novels that everyone has heard of but certainly not enough people have read. because if you haven't read this i implore you to change that. from the very first page i knew that this was crafted with such unbelievable intentionality. so many little details in the backgrounds of panels carry immense weight; this is a graphic novel masterclass. everything is perfectly balanced and thought-out. again on a craft level, and an emotional level, this blew me away.

5 - autobiography of red - anne carson - most inventive book i read probably? a disjointed yet fluid verse novel that follows a fascinating main character and winds effortlessly through mythology and reality, paying no attention to the usual borders of geography, time, or the body. i don't know how to describe this other than as a deeply confusing book that you will probably not understand at all but your body will somehow still feel everything. you will understand it on a subconscious level more than on a conscious one.

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honorable mentions (bc last year i did a top 10 but my opinions past this point are not as strong and also i don't want to write all that)

- body work by melissa febos

- sirens and muses by antonia angress

- comfort woman by nora okja keller

From Matthew Olzmann's book, Constellation Route. (Alice James, 2022).

Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz

by Matthew Olzmann

You whom I could not save, Listen to me.   Can we agree Kevlar backpacks shouldn’t be needed   for children walking to school? Those same children   also shouldn’t require a suit of armor when standing   on their front lawns, or snipers to watch their backs   as they eat at McDonalds. They shouldn’t have to stop   to consider the speed of a bullet or how it might   reshape their bodies. But one winter, back in Detroit,   I had one student who opened a door and died.   It was the front door of his house, but   it could have been any door, and the bullet could have written   any name. The shooter was thirteen years old   and was aiming at someone else. But   a bullet doesn’t care about “aim,” it doesn’t   distinguish between the innocent and the innocent,   and how was the bullet supposed to know this   child would open the door at the exact wrong moment   because his friend was outside and screaming   for help. Did I say I had “one” student who   opened a door and died? That’s wrong.   There were many. The classroom of grief   had far more seats than the classroom for math   though every student in the classroom for math   could count the names of the dead.   A kid opens a door. The bullet couldn’t possibly know,   nor could the gun, because “guns don’t kill people,” they don’t   have minds to decide such things, they don’t choose   or have a conscience, and when a man doesn’t   have a conscience, we call him a psychopath. This is how   we know what type of assault rifle a man can be,   and how we discover the hell that thrums inside   each of them. Today, there’s another   shooting with dead kids everywhere. It was a school,   a movie theater, a parking lot. The world   is full of doors. And you, whom I cannot save,   you may open a door and enter   a meadow or a eulogy. And if the latter, you will be   mourned, then buried in rhetoric.   There will be monuments of legislation,   little flowers made from red tape.   What should we do? we’ll ask again. The earth will close   like a door above you. What should we do?   And that click you hear? That’s just our voices,   the deadbolt of discourse sliding into place.

A poem by Matthew Olzmann

Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America

—Southern Pines, NC

Tell me what it’s like to live without curiosity, without awe. To sail on clear water, rolling your eyes at the kelp reefs swaying beneath you, ignoring the flicker of mermaid scales in the mist, looking at the world and feeling only boredom. To stand on the precipice of some wild valley, the eagles circling, a herd of caribou booming below, and to yawn with indifference. To discover something primordial and holy. To have the smell of the earth welcome you to everywhere. To take it all in, and then, to reach for your knife.

Matthew Olzmann

Image: The Oldest Longleaf Pine #1 by David Blevins 

and one day five summers ago, when you couldn’t put gas in your car, when your fridge was so empty—not even leftovers or condiments— there was a single twenty-ounce bottle of mountain dew, which you paid for with your last damn dime because you once overheard me say that i liked it.

'mountain dew commercial disguised as a love poem' matthew olzmann