How big is my brave: Deciduous

Link: A Poem

ITCH Magazine: A Journal of Creative Expression (Issue #12 Taboos) published another one of my poems.

A leap of honesty

Link: A Letter

The incredible lightness of self-preservation...

It's like yoga for your sanity.

The last book that made you cry?

North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell ...

Had my face awash with tears.

Currently reading...

My Mrs Dalloway (1925; this ed. 2000) copy I copped for ten bucks

I'm sitting on page 35 of 165.  It has been a slow read thus far as the narration itself is both here and there.  The last five or so pages read have finally introduced me to the mortality conscious nature of the novel; yes, this is subject matter that can be grey and intimidating but it's never too early in the day to contemplate life and agency.  

I watched The Hours earlier today, it is based off Virginia Woolf's depression and eventual suicide as well as the story of Mrs Dalloway and its connection to three generations, Woolf's included.  I liked the depiction and foresee how it will positively affect the duration of my reading.  The writing, as expected, is splendid indeed.

Seeds in the Black Earth (1988)

The above is a South African compiled anthology worth nearly 200 hundred pages of glorious, glorious poetry edited by a certain Brenda O'Brien... A book I happened to happen upon in my parents' library during the recent holidays.  The works span both the domestic and international, contemporary and classic.

I wonder if I'd be as committed to literature were it not for my folk and the literary environment they raised me in.  Whenever I visit home I discover a new world of wonder they had paved for me (and my siblings, of course) — 'tis a gratitude infinite.

10 Books That Stayed With You

The assignment: "List ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take but a few minutes and don’t think too hard — they don’t have to be the “right” or “great” works, just the ones that have touched you."

1) White Oleander - Janet Fitch

2) Black Skin, White Masks - Frantz Fanon

3) The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

4) The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison

5) Q&A - Vikas Swarup

6) Buck - Tamela Larimer

7) Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

8) The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

9) Autobiography of Red - Anne Carson

10) What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

Wow, this was incredibly difficult and compiled very hastily.  So many titles came to me the further I went down the list, but I stuck to putting down those that came to first and are a little more significant to me in some way or the other.

"Be kind to yourself while blooming."

"I am the lover and the loved,
home and the wanderer, she who splits
firewood and she who knocks, a stranger in the storm."

                 — Adrienne Rich

It's all so deeply personal.