#finished Ben Lerner’s TRANSCRIPTION

Really nice interview series w/ downtown NYC poets c. 1966.

#finished Tove Ditlevsen’s DEPENDENCY

#finished Tove Ditlevsen’s YOUTH.

I can’t seem to smell good today

#Finished CHILDHOOD by Tove Ditlevsen

#Finished Marios Chakkas’s THE COMMUNE (Inpatient Press, 2024), which is unrelentingly bleak and devilishly funny. Like this year’s Sirāt and The Secret Agent, it captures the doomed, absurd logic of fascist censure (except it’s nonfiction—sort of).

There are so few things I think should be illegal but the Dodgers / Yankees split ballcap is one of them.

Also #finished Michael Martin Shea’s I’M SORRY BUT NONE OF THIS IS MY FAULT (Essay Press).

AWP Amtrak reading. #finished Sentiment by Kai Ihns (blush lit / illicit zines). Hugely liked.

#Finished Bob Glück’s JACK THE MODERNIST (NYRB Classics reissue). The prose hefts the paratactic pleasures of contemporary poetry and LANGUAGE-adjacent compositional tactics in a tender, campy, porny, gossipy love letter that will make you cry yourself into existence. (If you don’t, just give up).

Tonight #finished Thomas Bernhard’s WOODCUTTERS and truly I can say that I enjoyed every word of it.

Not sure what compelled me but just #finished A Confederacy of Dunces

Tonight finally sat down with, started and #finished Terrence Arjoon’s THE DISINHERITED. He really did it. Best book of 2025.

#finished & loved Cedar Sigo’s SIREN OF ATLANTIS. “I want the most satanic podium for others to decipher, line upon line.” Was happy to revisit “A Scandal in Peril,” which I had the pleasure of publishing as Brooklyn Review poetry editor in ‘22.

Just #finished and deeply enjoyed Larry Levis’s WINTER STARS, reissued this month by Pitt Poetry

There needs to be a clothing store for 34 year old septuagenarians

TODAY. FOLEY SQUARE. 2 P.M.

Good moment to revisit this all-timer

A giant whose poetry would reward the attention of many lifetimes. Grateful to Mei-mei for the gift of her writing.

Finally #finished Jenny Erpenbeck’s VISITATION. Not sure what took me so long. I found it lovely & unnerving, sometimes a little heavy handed and the dolorous tone can be grating, but it takes a big swing. Nice example of archives mania in contemporary fiction.

This AM finished Kenneth Koch’s KO: A Season on Earth. Weird one! A postmodern, rhyming, Americana epic. Not particularly good, but points for its total submission to a whimsy that occasionally charms. Demerits for its tonal inscrutability and unneeded luridness.

Tonight #finished Gay Heaven is a Dance Floor but I Can’t Relax (Archways Editions 2024) by charles theonia

This weekend #finished Coteries and Gossip by David Trinidad and My First Visit to the University of Maine by Jennifer Moxley (The Lettered Streets Press Split Series vol. 4) and The Blackbird by Christian Schlegel (Beautiful Days Press)

#finished de Chirico’s MR. DUDRON trans. Stefania Heim. I laughed a lot and will never forget this description of overcooked pasta: “The insipidness of that boiled white mass surpassed all that can be imagined.”

Out of the frying pan (former neighbor had roaches) into the fire (new neighbor has modular synthesizers).

Just #finished MOTHERHOOD by Sheila Heti. I read it slowly starting in October, with a few breaks to finish other things (I also misplaced it briefly). Will this book about love’s many registers stay with me forever? Yes.

#Finished Anna Biller’s Bluebeard’s Castle (Verso).

Just #finished & enjoyed Lara Mimosa Montes’s The Time of the Novel (Wendy’s Subway 2025). What if Alice was a bookworld precariat and Wonderland was given a Kmart realist remodel. “It was like the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog and never stopped.”

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

None other than Harryette Mullen!

Just #finished Mark McMorris’s Entrepôt. Seductive, erudite, often sinister sequences of long-lined, mid-length pomes. Held together by 17 epistles. First-order postcolonial gothic lit—fantasy-tinged. From Coffee House Press, 2010.

Where but KCR can you hear a program of classical tributes to Lenin on your morning commute ❤️

First as tragedy, then as farce, then as fashion.

KAIROS by Jenny Erpenbeck. Just #finished … very unsettling read.

Alan Gilbert, THE EVERYDAY LIFE OF DESIGN 2nd ed. (winter editions 2024). #finished and loved

Motorists, who cause (literally) 99% of pedestrian fatalities in NYC, get off with warnings. Meanwhile cyclists are slapped with criminal summonses and get their infrastructure yanked. Adams continues to amaze!

Just #finished Robert Glück’s ABOUT ED after taking a semilong break between its first and second books. Moved me very much—left me with so much to think about—but I am especially left with several passages about the afterlife of objects in “Ed’s Things” / the white Pyrex cup on Bob’s nightstand

“And the advancement of that movement—for socialism, for freedom, for social peace, for the unity of the multiethnic working class—is how we end the 9/11 Era. Not shallow declarations by Security State-allegiant politicians…. By organizing and outcompeting them.”

She’s a democatic socialist

Mamdani speech has gotta be the greatest nyc democratic primary victory speech in history—no way it's even close. I LOVE YOU, NEW YORK!

Jeffrey Joe Nelson, POSTCARDS FROM THE HIVE (Slab Editions, 2025). #finished

The fuck is this? “Best overall pick for mayor”? The Times used to do the serious thing and endorse a candidate. Now they’re stooping to “Wirecutter but for politics.”

Reading tonite in the East Village.

So low this week grappling with the death of my former prof. Cole Heinowitz. Cole fully reoriented me at 19 by modeling a contemporary life of reading & writing among poets I hadn’t known was possible. I was sure I’d see her at Pete’s Candy Store this summer. My teacher—I needed you still 💔

“The public sphere is so debased that saying anything true is a breach of etiquette. The profiteer says there is no tomorrow and then turns that cliché into the daily reality of his victims.” Robert Glück, About Ed

Groundbreaking poet Alice Notley, winner of the Poetry Society‘s 2018 Shelley Memorial Award, has passed away. Rest in Poetry.

Alan Gilbert

Kostas Anagnopoulos, HAIKU (Smoke Specs 2024). #finished in a record 5 minutes. Fully delightful little book.

Lucy Sante, I Heard Her Call My Name (2024). #finished & loved