1) The National, “Laugh Track” / As I told a friend this week, I’m the type to grow suspicious when too many good things land in my lap. So learning of a second National record this year, I left myself to fear and unease. Of course, The National recreates, then consoles those feelings in me and does so in 12 more tracks here. Collaborations with Justin Vernon, Phoebe Bridgers and Rosanne Cash thrill; tunes like “Space Invader,” “Hornets” and “Smoke Detector” join one of the most significant canons of my adult life.
2) Explosions in the Sky, “End” / There’s always magic in an Explosions in the Sky record, the band capable of soundtracking the movie playing in your head—and, increasingly, as the band ages and matures—the broken lines of poetry still lodged in your heart.
3) Sarah Mary Chadwick, “Messages to God” / Take the Romanticism of Tori Amos, the almost-painful vulnerability felt from the front row of a Broadway show, ravenous turns of phrase and marry them all to a guileless Australian timbre and you have the vibe of this gorgeous record from Sarah Mary Chadwick.
4) Brenda Shaughnessy, “The Nature of Shelter” for The Yale Review / Shaughnessy’s poems are forever challenging us at each level: head, heart, limbs—and all the tissue that connects them. Here, we feel our comfort craving everywhere and question the forms and facsimiles we’ve so far accepted.
I want molecules upon molecules
to ebb out my eyes and enter
my mouth,
are you molecules?
Do you dare smoke
in winter
for the sex air?
5) Carole Burns, “The Many Lessons from James Baldwin’s Another Country” for Lit Hub / I so appreciated Burns’ exploration of a novel that hasn’t really left me since reading it a year or two ago. Burns’ understanding of Baldwin’s understanding of his characters, and how that intimate knowledge is conveyed, is deeply satisfying and illuminates much.
But I also think that, as writers, we’re fearful – of being sentimental; of being obvious; of our writing being viewed, if we state an idea simply, as simplistic.
There is nothing simplistic about Baldwin’s straight-forward simplicity. Everything in Baldwin is complex.