1) Hiss Golden Messenger, “Sanctuary” / MC Taylor is one of those rare songwriters whose art makes me want to be a better, more integrated man. The sound of Taylor’s voice, here and elsewhere, drips with wisdom and Southern soul. The words call us to the sacredness and wildness of all things. So it’s little surprise that a new Hiss Golden Messenger song feels like an event to me: a gentle, life-affirming event I’ll want to relive over and again.
2) Shame, “Drunk Tank Pink” / The sophomore effort by this British band is big and buzzy, full of ravenous punk energy—yet showing off just enough restraint to be truly interesting. These songs shake the rafters, but they also burrow into the soul’s smaller places, finding the heart of the singular and general anxieties we feel.
3) Taylor Byas, “South Side” / What is there to say about this poem cycle from Taylor Byas other than … My. God. Winner of Frontier Poetry’s 2020 Award for New Poets, this work digs through Black triumph and the ruins of specific lives, handles love and lust with fragility and hindsight, and maps out a particular Midwest known and cherished by its residents. Byas’ work crackles and consoles in ways that can’t be overstated. I could read a passage like this 100 times and find at least 100 things in it:
The Chicago skyline
undulates into view like a vision, glitters
like a firework mushrooming out against the wine-
red of a scramming sky. If water is mirror,what does that make of me? I call a friend
who lives back home, tell her I miss the heartbeat
of Chicago, the way the skyscrapers seem to bend
down to protect me. I skip a rock to pleatthe water’s calm. Yet I still see you there.
The river carries you downstream like a prayer.
4) Eric Schumacher, “My Last Name” / Pastor, songwriter and writer Eric Schumacher offers readers the opportunity to accompany a beautiful soul through her last moments in this quietly stirring novella. We enter the mind, gorgeous and confused, of a woman in dementia’s decline and learn her story through a series of first kisses and last names, births and deaths, husbands and children—both born and chosen. Schumacher does both readers and his main character a great mercy, presenting her in fits and starts and as she connects the dots of life.
You know—this will sound silly, I am sure—but I felt as though that morning that Reverend Ellis was the first man to give me a kiss. He did not kiss me, not like John and Everett (and now that man) kissed me. They kissed me. But Reverend Ellis gave me a kiss. It felt as though I had been kissed on the forehead, right there in the front of the church. As I thought about it, I knew that I had been. It was as though, through Reverend Ellis’ hand and the water and the words that he spoke, God himself had bent down and kissed me on the forehead and said, “You are my daughter now, and Jack is my son, and I will care for you as my own, and I will never leave you nor forsake you, even to the end of the age.”
5) Jane Driver, “Comedy is tragedy plus time, and other equations.” for 251 / I love the work my friend Jane Driver is making in the realm of the funny. An eye for sharp satire and a soul knack for meaningful punchlines guide Jane’s writing. Here, she takes on our tried-and-truisms, offering a few formulas that turn genre inside-out (such as the glorious “Arthouse is unconventionally attractive people plus moody music plus symbolism you don’t quite understand but can’t ask about without feeling silly.”). Check out her work here and elsewhere.