1) Willie Nelson, “A Beautiful Time” / I don’t know what you hear when Willie Nelson sings. I always hear warmth, no matter the accompanying sensibility. Warm weariness. Warm ache. Warm laughter. On Nelson’s latest, warm wisdom and reflection carry the day. This album more than lives up to its name, filled with gorgeous reflections for whatever road you’re on.
2) Toro y Moi, “Mahal” / Chaz Bundick can do little to no wrong. Often, the Toro y Moi mastermind is not only the smartest person in the room, but the coolest and funkiest. Bundick is once again all those things on a record that seamlessly blends pop, rock, hip-hop, funk and soul. Pure delight from start to finish.
3) Sara Nović, “True Biz” / Nović’s new novel is a coming-of-age tale marked by a peerless blend of warm-hearted generosity and dark humor. Set among daily life at a boarding school for the deaf, “True Biz” explores topics one might expect given its teen population—love, sex, belonging, various levels of family function and disfunction—but also slips between the subcultures that exist within subcultures to explore degrees of understanding and division. Small but enlightening formal inventions build context around the main stories, creating a holistic look at deaf culture.
4) Alina Ştefănescu, “Fourteen Variations on Silence” for Majuscule / No one writes like my friend Alina, a poet and beautiful provocateur in whatever genre she takes up. As someone learning to live with, and grow comfortable between, the silences of my daily existence, this piece feels like a Bible worth returning to over and again. There is wisdom (and a jogging of the senses) enough to meditate on for months and months. Specific lines grow embodied on the digital page (“I remember motion as patches of radiant light,” for one), but I encourage living with and in the entirety of the piece, even if one variation at a time, to appreciate its wholeness.
5) Jessica Kantrowitz, “Blessings for the Long Night” / I’m so thankful for the work of my friend Jessica Kantrowitz. Whether on Twitter, or in her books, she crafts a liturgy strong enough to hold the depressed and weary—yet vulnerable enough that they recognize themselves inside it.
I want to rush through her new book (subtitled “Poems and Meditations to Help You Through Depression”) and take in every small, nourishing entry at once. But I’m trying to slow myself down and soak in every word of empathy and affirmation. Her beatitude for overthinkers and gentle admonition to find strange, surprising safety in the calm after a storm have been a ballast to me over the past week.