2024 Reading List

Starting off a zero-reader newsletter w/ a year-end list of personal reads seems silly bordering on narcissistic BUT I will persevere through the minor scruples of what seems like good taste to bring you the most pressing updates of my 2024 of finished print texts. Favs in bold, press mentioned when relevant, a few thoughts from whatever I remember whenever something seems worth saying.

Dust Bowl Descent - Ganzel - Nebraska UP

Aliss at the Fire - Jon Fosse (tr. Damon Searls) - Dalkey: do enjoy the rhythmic plain style of Fosse. but…

Miss Lonelyhearts - Nathanael West - New Directions

Little Labors - Rivka Galchen - New Directions

Last Night - James Salter

Boys Fight - Marina Temkina and Michel Gérard - Ugly Duckling Presse

Airships - Barry Hannah

As You Like It - Billy

Julius Caesar - Billy: during the pandemic i saw Billy’s picture w/ his ear pierced and then got Carli to do mine with a bookbinding needle but she started passing out halfway through and i was like Man, hey, i need you to finish this, and she was sort of like, No, not really, and I said what do you mean not really and she was like Yeah, no, and then I got really hot and I had to sit down for a little minute and then finish pushing it through in the mirror. anyway. both of these plays were alright, not my faves. barely remember julius caesar tbh

Books of Mark, Matthew, Job, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon — love the bible. God is such an interesting ideological container, site of aesthetic / political / superstructural confluence creating dictat for society and there’s usually no pretense that these concepts are separate…very very interesting… gospels are obviously more overtly political. really lost steam in Luke, who I kind of hate. plodding cow. you plodding cow, Luke! Mark is my boy. Confirmed in the name of Mark tbh. Nearly became a formal apostate a year or so later but it seemed like maybe a bit much. Now reading Daniel; love Daniel, so good. Nebuchadnezzar…so interesting, so archetypically “King.” And ofc interesting to keep prophets / wisemen around, interesting concept of role of intellectuals at court if you look through the warped glass of the mythic past the right way. I’m so into stained glass right now………….

Dust Bowl Diary - Ann Marie Low - Nebraska UP: Ann Marie Low lives forever more in my heart after this reflective diary of farm life leading up to and through the Dust Bowl in North Dakota. I leaned on it so much while at work on a novel; the cyclical, plainsong tragedies are buried in me. I hitched out to the North Dakota county she lived in, to find the site of her home, and I did: just large stones arrayed gently in suggestion of foundation, just outside a tall cottonwood grove, that’s all that’s left, sinking in a wildlife preserve. As I left a black eagle flew over me. It was massive.

Sickle of Syntax, Hammer of Tautology: Concrete and Visual Poetry in Yugoslavia, 1968-1983 — ed. Sezgin Boynik - OEI (Sweden) #90-91: interesting look into Yugoslavian intellegentsia

Toxicon and Arachne - Joyelle McSweeney - Nightboat: god damn I love Joyelle McSweeney’s poetry, linguistic richness, dripping actually, dense and layered in grief, the personal and the global each brought to face and match each other’s intensities

Deathstyles - “ - Nightboat

Conquered City - Victor Serge (tr. Richard Greenman) - NYRB: occasionally beautiful, and imo extremely valuable in understanding the revolution from the inside

The Communist - Guido Morselli (tr. Frederika Randall) - NYRB

Toughlahoma - Christian TeBordo - Rescue Press

Dream Boat - Shelley Feller - CSU Poetry Center: more outstanding linguistic richness

Discours sur le colonialisme - Aimé Césaire - Présence africaine (reread): of special note this time is Césaire’s reliance on Maldoror for depicting the European bourgeois…sunk into me

Abolish the Family - Sophie Lewis - Verso (Salvage)

Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter

Diary of One Who Vanished - Seamus Heaney

Capital of Pain - Paul Éluard (tr. Richard M. Weisman) - Mushinsha | Grossman: thank u gentle French surrealism

Midnight in the Century - Victor Serge - NYRB

The Paintings of William Blake — Raymond Lister — Cambridge UP: my BOY

Autumn Sonata - Georg Trakl (tr. Simko) - Moyer Bell Ltd. (reread). - in my personal pantheon

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck: sure

The Life of Tu Fu - Eliot Weinberger - New Directions: this was good

Ventrakl - Christian Hawkey - Ugly Duckling Presse (reread): a one time favorite, still very much enjoyed, though more conscious this time that its power comes so much from its Traklishness

The Odyssey - Homer, Fagles (ha)

Memorial - Alice Oswald

The Hunters - James Salter: love this horny man

Mortals - Norman Rush

Still Life with Insects - Brian Kitely - Ticknor and Fields

Revolutionary Teamsters - Bryan D. Palmer - Haymarket

The Girl - Meridel Le Sueur - West End Press (Revised Edition 1990): straight into the center of my new conception of political aesthetics that I hope to elaborate at length soon. I ride for Meridel

Adorno, Benjamin, Block, Brecht, Lukàcs: Aesthetics and Politics - ed. Fred J - Verso

The Flamethrowers - Rachel Kushner

Late in the Antenna Fields - Alan Gilbert - Futurepoem

Icewalker and Dirtworm - Eric Wallgren - Community Mausoleum: intriguing cycle doing something particularly interest in the nexus of character poem…almost establishing an abstract narrative…idk i thought about it quite a bit

A Small Place - Jamaica Kincaid

A Way of Living: The Art of de Kooning - Phaidon: still amazed at total nullity of most art critics i encounter. de Kooning’s phase in the 30’s is very interesting tho, it’s at this perfect (for me) inflection point b/w figuration/abstraction

The Wretched of the Earth - Frantz Fanon (tr. Constance Farrington)- Grove Press Black Cat Edition 1982: I find it so hard to trust theorists with clean hands. I trust Fanon deeply. I’ve been slowly reading sections of this book since I became “actually” politically active, from climate nonviolence to the George Floyd Uprising and obviously it’s taken on much direct relevance to the genocide in Gaza. Not only does Fanon always seem to be right there, wherever the world is, but he seems to be exactly where I need him to be, with something for whichever stage of political consciousness I find myself in. Most recently his thoughts on culture and consciousness have seemed surprisingly valuable, and surprisingly undigested by Western Marxists thinking through the same topics…

Lost Illusions - Honoré de Balzac - Modern Library Edition

Wrong Norma - Anne Carson - New Directions Press: I’M GAY FOR ANNE CARSON (AND NO ONE BELIEVES ME)

Immediacy, or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism- Anna Kornbluh - Verso — technically finished 2025 but loved it, for the most part. a few small stylistic critiques (please, Anna, fewer roundoffs into internetty quips…your loyal reader beseeches you). a couple places where the materialist theory (for the most part so impressively deployed, loved it, very interesting and original at least to vulgar philistine ass) of circulation as inflecting immediacy style got a little thin. but on the whole very convincing and has totally succeeded in creating a new category / lens for me, which i look forward to seeing everywhere from now on. in fact…was funny to go see Babygirl a couple nights ago, just after finishing Immediacy, with a partial expectation that it would be, like, a Chef’s Table version of Saltburn—you know, we took your grandma’s peasant dish and elevated it—a fairly low bar which I actually think it cleared, at least if you view it through the lens of family abolition, but anyway, there were a couple times where it did draw pretty close to a (à la Kornbluh) colonoscopic-style deployment of its sexual themes, which definitely brought the undercurrents of Immediacy to mind, made additionally funny because the Kidman character is CEO of a shipping automation company, revolutionizing circulation to the tun of extreme profit, of course….ha…a little joke or confluence just for me….

tune in soon for more……