1) The Hold Steady, “Heavy Covenant” / I’m not sure where I’d be the past 15 years or so without the music of The Hold Steady. Frontman Craig Finn (my nominee for the nation’s first Rock Poet Laureate, whenever we get there) pens stories of scene kids and ne'er-do-wells whose circumstances I can’t relate to—but their stories dredge up and begin healing the loneliness and doubt in my own. The band’s new single, foregrounding an upcoming release, is a wonderful exemplar of what The Hold Steady does: literary fictions (that ring true) set to soulful keys, bar-band guitars and Memphis horns. May rock and roll like this never, ever die.
2) Mt. Wilson Repeater, “Burned Up Ghost” / Really dig this one from sonic mastermind Jim Putnam, who creates buzzy soundscapes that manage to comfort and console. Each aspect of Putnam’s arrangements is deliberate yet sounds like a natural overflow of the heart.
3) Pádraig Ó Tuama and Jason Myers, “A Sacramental Understanding Of The Earth” for EcoTheo Review / There’s so very much to love in this conversation between two soulful, considerate poets. Perhaps my favorite exchange goes like this. When Myers speaks of how we engage in “othering nature,” his Irish counterpart responds:
Yeah and our cities are nature, because we made them. Our work is nature, everything is nature. Human nature is nature. So therefore, yeah, all of those features that you see in a city are not divorced from nature, they are part of it. The question is, are they good enough part of it? And is our relationship with tilling a land or creating borders on a map or building buildings … is that good enough nature?
4) Lore Wilbert, “Hospitable Hospitals and Space to Grieve What’s Lost” / This piece from my friend Lore Ferguson Wilbert would speak to my soul even if I wasn’t cited in it (which I didn’t know until opening it). Lore and I are on so many of the same pages, and she touches upon them here. Her work speaks to a lack of certainty (and a type of jealousy for it) in the face of mystery. It also lays out the calculus I’m betting so much on: If the object of my faith is steadfast, I’m not required to be sure about much else. Lore writes:
I used to envy the sure, sure that if I could muster up an ounce of their confidence I’d be stronger, prettier, better, smarter, faster, quicker, slicker. But as my faith in God alone increases, I find my faith in pretty much everything else decreases.
And, in passages like this, she lays out the sort of unsteadiness that somehow guides me through each day:
This is why I’ve struggled to grieve publicly about my sadness of the collective year we have passed or are coming upon soon. I think a great number of you are grieving too and a great number of you are unfazed, and it’s the surety with which you hold your position that intimidates me sometimes. I am nothing if not a bit wobbly and I’ve never pretended otherwise.
Please rest in and wrestle with this one.
5) Matthew Andrews, “The Cup” and “Maundy” for Macrina Magazine / I love both of these poems from Matthew Andrews, especially “Maundy”—which staggered me with its opening, then kept me dizzied by weight and wonder the whole way.
Miles of dirt are clinging
to my legs, to my feet,
as I arrive at the pool,
the natural void
filled in by the river
as it makes its way down
the mountain.