I’ve gotten a lot of really meaningful feedback on it, including from a college friend Amy who shared a quote with me, which I will share here (emphasis mine):

“I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly — a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, charting, devising proper nouns for unnamed or stripped-of-names geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure, incarceration in holding camps, prisons, or death, singly or in war. There is however a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity or dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art.”

- Toni Morrison, “Peril,” Burn this Book

“The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop
“Ode To My Socks” by Pablo Neruda
“Crepe de Chine” by Mark Doty
“My Son The Man” by Sharon Olds

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons and Lifting Belly

Eileen Myles, The Importance of Being Iceland

Tracy K. Smith, Duende

Saeed Jones, When The Only Light is Fire

And so many other random odds and ends. Jean-Luc Nancy’s Fifty-eight indices, and Édouard Levé’s “When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue” over at The Paris Review. (And, in the words of Marcel the Shell, “sometimes I’ll just read a receipt… I like to get a feel for daily life.”)

I first met Justin at the 2010 Lambda Literary Retreat for Emerging LGBT Writers. He was on his way to San Francisco to begin his Stegner, and I was rooming with his best friend, so he stayed in LA for the night. Since then, I’ve kept up with him and his writing, and was floored by his new novel, We the Animals, which I can’t recommend enough. So it was a real pleasure to get to talk to Justin on-record for Devil’s Lake about his book, the usefulness of workshops, writing a queer narrator, and much more, which you can read for yourself in the interview.

So, how powerful it was to get to read that poem seven hours later, along with other poets featured in Collective Brightness– Brent Goodman, Raymond Luczak, and John Medeiros, and to meet and talk with folks after the event for whom this anthology means so much. I’m very grateful to Kevin Simmonds, the editor of the anthology, and to Bryan over at Sibling Rivalry Press, who have both been a dream to work with.

In other news, I recently I was named the new Editor-in-Chief of Devil’s Lake, a literary journal that was founded here at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by a recent batch of poets. It’s a great journal to have inherited, and I have a talented and passionate staff, and I’m really excited to lead DL into its next few years. I encourage you to check us out on the web, to keep an eye out for our events in Madison and at AWP, and to submit your best work to us!