On Community and the Afterlives of Disablement
+ Introducing the Pain Baby Podcast!
As we move toward the end of the year, I’m considering both the mad pile-up of atrocity of the last eleven months, and what it means to have published and launched a book that serves a document that remembers living under lockdown and the Trump regime in 2020-2021 in granular detail. The Black Lives Matter marches and their impact. The vans picking up bodies, packing them in dry ice. Teaching high school students with a laptop on my knees, not knowing if I might be able to walk further than the bathroom that day. Trump claiming he’ll pull DOE funding if schools don’t open during a pandemic, and suggesting that infected people drink bleach.
The Relativity of Living Well zooms out to comment on the country and the world and zooms in to the experience of my body, its pain, its loneliness—the sudden and conspicuous brush with death by COVID that continues to haunt me. What does it mean to have come so close more than once in this life, and to consider how to live in a time when Muslim brown bodies, queer bodies, disabled bodies, and radical leftist ideas are all under explicit assault? What does it mean, now, to live well? The stakes of what is relative have grown so outsized, it’s hard to hold them in one’s mind at one time. How do I drink a glass of water knowing pregnant women in Gaza are drinking brackish? How do I talk to my friends who live with the fear and uncertainty of their friends and families’ safety in Beirut?
Coming together in community to share poems, commiserate, be in solidarity, and share joy feels crucially, vitally important. It may seem like a small thing, but I am learning that the impulse toward isolation breeds more fear. I keep thinking about having had a book launch just days before the election at Brooklyn Poets, sharing the stage with my MC and poet brother Anthony Thomas Lombardi, and readers Theo LeGro and Eduardo Martinez-Leyva. Sharing stories of survival, holding each other, and sharing moments of awe healed me a little as I walked into the next week knowing what was coming, and still being completely unprepared.
We talk a great deal about community, but I am increasingly interested in writing about, reading about, and talking about what community actually means, how we build it, sustain it, and critique it with love in order to live—truly live—in a world that is increasingly unbearable.
Public conversations about the relationship between community and poetry have been my bread and butter of late. The first person I was able to make sentences to after the election was Scottish poet and editor Claire Thom, who warmly invited me to feature on the Wee Sparrow Poetry Podcast to talk about The Relativity of Living Well and its afterlives. Claire steers the conversation with inordinate sensitivity and kindness, and invites me to read several of the poems from the book. Give it a listen!
The structure of Wee Sparrow’s podcast inspired me to pursue more of these conversations, both as a listener, and as an editor and producer. Given Substack’s new podcast features, I will soon be publishing the Pain Baby Podcast, featuring interviews and conversations with artists whose work and being are deeply focused on supporting and fostering community. The first episode, coming soon, is a conversation my queer poet kin Hunter Hodkinson talking about Dead End Zine and their recently released chapbook, Mean Gays (Tiny Cutlery, 2024). I’m very excited to share this new little project with you! I hope it can provide a sliver of succor. Stay tuned.
Upcoming Reading and Other News
Poetry Reading, Center for the Study of Women and Society
The Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, NY 10016
Martin E. Segal Theatre
December 13, 6 p.m. Free. Registration required.
I am very excited to be returning to my alma mater to join poet and Director of the Center for Humanities, Kendra Sullivan, as she celebrates her debut collection Reps (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024). In Reps, Kendra Sullivan cycles through a series of operational exercises that gradually enable her to narrate an attempted escape from the trappings of narrativity—plot, character, chronology, and the promise of a probable future issuing forth from a stable past. Sullivan explores, by turns, the open sea as a mode of knowing and means of conveying knowledge; the fluidity of beings, nonbeings, and the forces animating both; maps, countermaps, and the restructuring of shared worlds through the un/disciplined integration of discrete epistemes; and the cultivation of a few anti-catastrophic [writing] strategies to locate and live by the compass in compassion in an age of climate chaos. Come through!
Nancy Craig Blackburn Fellowship, Randolph College MFA
After many years hemming and hawing about whether to pursue and MFA in poetry, I’m deeply grateful to have been accepted into Randolph College’s low-residency MFA program as a Nancy Craig Blackburn Fellow. Many thanks to Diana Khoi Nguyen, who convinced me to pursue my dreams and convinced me that Randolph would be a generative and nourishing community. So far, the love has been swift and warm, and I’m deeply excited to go to my first MFA residency this December. Yay!
Community Opportunities:
Registration for In Surreal Life’s January session is officially open! Register now!
As I never tire of telling everyone who will listen, Shira Erlichman’s online creativity school for poets, In Surreal Life, made a poet of me. The ISL community will hold your work, your fear, your joy, and your growth with unparalleled warmth. Shira’s daily prompts challenge you to experiment with form, yes, but most of all, to face yourself as a creative person whose boundless freedom only requires your permission to unlock. The January session will be the last for which I will have the privilege of serving as a fellow and steering the cohort alongside Judith Ohikuare. This session’s Visiting Artists are also a knockout lineup: Danez Smith, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, and Brittany Rogers for the BIPOC exclusive. I don’t know how it could get any shinier than that. If you’re looking to start the year newly committed to your creativity, now is the time to apply!
Epiphany Magazine Holiday Party
Thursday, December 12, 6:30 p.m.
Francis Kite Club, 40 Loisaida Ave, New York, NY 10009
Ticket link
Epiphany Magazine, where I serve as poetry editor, is having a holiday party! Come mingle with fellow poets, writers, editors, publishers, and agents, enjoy an open bar, and hear the beautiful work of Nadia Owasu and several other readers. I will be there selling the magazine and doling out the tightest of hugs. Join us!
Recommended:
Poems:
“After Hours Elsewhere,” by Alex Watson
“What if the Covid Safety Net Had been a Starting Point for Change?” Steven W. Thrasher
The Poetry Foundation’s Thanksgiving Poetry Collection
It might sound cheesy, but I used to pull from this collection all the time while teaching classes the week of Thanksgiving, and some of them are astonishingly beautiful. A way to cut through the bullshit of ‘celebrating’ a genocide during a genocide to connect with the human need for coming together, feeling gratitude, breaking bread, and thinking about the relationship between humanity and historical accountability.
Listens:
VS. Podcast: Sarah Ghazal Ali vs. Faith
Sarah Ghazal Ali describes faith as a literary endeavor toward some kind of truth or divinity, and this particular approach has been knocking around my brain as I work to reconcile my life experiences and my growing Islamic faith. A beautiful listen.
Huberman Lab Podcast: Esther Perel: How to Find, Build, & Maintain Healthy Romantic Relationships
As a seasoned polyamorous person, I abandoned the practice of engaging with media that explores romantic relationships as its focus, as if I had nothing left to learn. (I also bristle at the assumption, and occasional reality, that people with non-normative relationships structures make those structures their whole personalities, but that’s a whole other Substack essay.) This podcast episode on relationships can be applied to contexts far from romantic, and is a good reminder about the physiology and neurobiology of co-regulation, attachment, and stress. A great one.
Until next time!
Catching up on my readings, very late! Will just comment on this podcast you recommend - I will find all of them later - on faith as an endeavor. I've been using more and more different religious elements (like the altar as a character and hymns) and faith symbols in my writings not because I'm growing in my faith but because it just seems so natural sometimes. Excited about your podcast! And of course, as always, thank you for describing accurately what this past year has been like.
warning uncontained enthusiasm ahead:
AAHHHH!!! i am SO excited about your podcast & getting to listen to your soothing intelligent voice as you explore important topics with awesome people AHH!!! !!!!