New arrivals.

Catalan poet Gemma Gorga rereads the Penelope and Ulysses story The Aged Penelope Speaks Ulysses, absent Far off, a hand is cutting back the lilac and keeping the seed for summer

New arrivals. I'm very excited about these. @deepvellum.bsky.social

I married a Canadian and realized I haven't read very much Canadian lit. I'm starting with this. Any other recommendations?

"Despite the best efforts of people...spring was still spring, even in the city." -Tolstoy, The Resurrection, tr. Anthony Briggs Tolstoy is brilliant and still relevant.

War. And after that? War. And now? War. War. History might as well be water, chastising this shore. -Carol Ann Duffy, The Wound in Time, written on the occasion of the centenary of the first World War. #everynightapoem

because normalcy is surely dead we’ve watermelons replaced our heads why not? When nothing else makes human sense: An entire world is intertwined in this glaring, pink genocide. -"Sweet Dissociation" by Willow Sommer @toughpoets.bsky.social

Epigraph to Jean-Luc Nancy’s After Fukushima: The Equivalence of Catastrophes, translated by Charlotte Mandell @avecsesdoigts.bsky.social

W.S. Merwin

Scott Abbott's beautiful tribute to his friend, the poet Alex Caldiero. wp.me/p2VlSS-2KU

Reminded of Larkin’s poem ‘Coming’ today with the longer, lighter Spring evening

💙 In Case You Missed It 💙

Bonjour, melancholie with poet Vasko Popa. Orphan Absence You have the figure of an abandoned abyss There's a smell of absence about you

To the Moon and Back by Eliana Ramage: Knowing who you are alifeinbooks.co.uk/2026/03/to-t...

An unexpected favourite from the #InternationalBookerPrize2026, Matteo Melchoirre's The Duke, translated by Antonella Lettieri and published by @foundryeditions.bsky.social 1streading.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/t...

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction is now available in a print version. Unfortunately, couldn't make it free (lowest prices allowed): Print-on-demand: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/gilbert-so... Paperback: www.lulu.com/shop/daniel-...

Would anyone like to read Galsworthy's The Forsyte Saga with @yelenafurman.bsky.social and me? We'll start in late April. It's hundreds of pages but looks, at first glance of the ToC, like a chapter-a-day kind of book... Details to come if anyone would like to join us! 📚

Recovering from surgery and turned my library into a cozy bedroom. And, of course, Henry is my nurse.

Trying to pray with Canadian poet Leo Kennedy. And praying for Spring. Words for a Resurrection Each pale Christ stirring underground Splits the brown casket of its root, Wherefrom the rousing soil upthrusts A narrow pointed shoot

Ashbery

Phoebe loves the snow!

In @stonecirclereview.bsky.social, a poem I wrote as I was finishing the manuscript for An Absence of Sea—a poem of flesh and hours, about the porousness of the human and time experienced as sensation rather than sequence. stonecirclereview.com/vessel/

“I do not know how to rid the world of evil, or whether one is simply supposed to endure it. But you are there and are having an effect, and the poems have an effect of their own and help to protect you—that is the answer and a counterbalance in this world.” — Ingeborg Bachmann to Paul Celan, 1958

Currently reading. @nyrb-imprints.bsky.social @toughpoets.bsky.social

First review of the year on my blog - Palaver by Bryan Washington: Home is where the heart is alifeinbooks.co.uk/2026/01/pala... #BookSky

Phoebe with her Canadian sisters, Willow and Juno.

“miracles of darkness”

A wonderful study on imagery by Thom Gunn Consider the snail I cannot tell what power is at work, drenched there with purpose, knowing nothing. What is a snail's fury?

'Nothing is pleasanter to me than exploring a library' — Walter Savage Landor

You are neither silence nor language: The Answer to Lord Chandos by Pascal Quinard @wakefieldpress.bsky.social roughghosts.com/2026/01/16/y...

'…Really that young man, I’ve no patience at all with him; he behaves like a very unconvincing character in a book, not like a human being at all.’ #BookSky 💙📚 jacquiwine.wordpress.com/2026/01/13/c...

Very excited to announce our Fall 2026 books via our newsletter today. And now here! BLUE SUNSET by Denise Rose Hansen and WHAT REMAINS by Brais Lamela (trans by Jacob Rogers) will be out Oct 6, 2026! Read more about these two wonderful new novels at our website: dorothyproject.com/books-gallery/

Managed to find a used copy & looking forward to timetravel allenginsberg.org/2018/11/m-n-5/

Ashbery

Re-upping for the holiday weekend crowd: New issue on boredom quotes Barbara Pym, Henry James, The Kills, Elisa Gabbert, Penelope Fitzgerald, Nicola Griffith, Mary McCarthy, Lars Iyer, Ilka Chase, Orson Wells, and many other folks. Napoleon among them.

Julian Barnes's departure: his cancer, his deaf dog, Martin Amis's last email to him, and why he's stopping writing novels so that he doesn't die in the middle of one and have some other bastard finish it for him. Me on Barnes's final book: