1) Kacey Musgraves, “Deeper Well” / There is a pastoral, natural quality—a sort of gentle reaching out to every surrounding thing—that marks the latest Kacey Musgraves record. Rarely do we here that sort of calm on a pop record; perhaps that sounds like a strange compliment, or not one at all, but it made “Deeper Well” a delightful and a necessary listen to me.
2) The Messthetics and James Brandon Lewis, s/t / Join one of our most priestly saxophonists and an inventive instrumental trio, and what you get is a gorgeous document that touches jazz and surf rock and Radiohead-like motion and weather. Come for every moment before, stay long enough to hear the unaccompanied Lewis coda that closes the album.
3) Tommy Orange, “Wandering Stars” / How do you sum a new Tommy Orange novel? “Wandering Stars” traffics in the weight of history, addiction, indigenous identity, how we live in light of who we spring forth from; it’s beautiful at the sentence level and tethered within itself, creating a truly rare unity; it’s a novel that reaches back to its predecessor while doing something brilliant and original. But even this exclamation comes up short: you must take and read one of the most electric, soulful novelists we’re fortunate to have.
4) Caylin Capra-Thomas, “March 20th, 2014” for Past Ten / I love when poets write essays, and there’s so much to love in this Capra-Thomas piece: her descriptions of Montana and a tiny apartment building (“the edge-lands between argument and aria”); her handling of memory; the clear-eyed affection she holds for a brother. What did a number on me, though, was the description of trying to be good—and trying to fathom where that leaves you in relationship to others. I know this feeling, this search:
My stomach churned with dread for movie villains getting their comeuppance. At seven, I followed closely the Tonya Harding trial, hoping against hope they’d let her off, let her skate around again. And when in fourth grade I found pot plants growing in Curtis’s closet, I watered them with ammonia so he wouldn’t be found out.
5) Jen Grace Stewart, “Fashion” for Psaltery and Lyre / I can’t quite comprehend the way Jen Stewart unspools so much theology and personal history, so much of our purity culture, in one poem. She takes us back to the first Eden, and back to the saplings of the knowledge of good and evil in our own existence, aligning our memories and our moods with the speaker’s.
St Theresa said
God has no body but your own, but
I hadn’t read that yet, so I fingeredaround elastic edges, learned how
their roughness chafed me like guilt,how I liked that separation—between
the nakedness and knowing it.