Hello, friends. It’s been a while. And, yes, a lot has happened in the past year. I read 35 books, watched 32 movies, and completed 44 seasons of television. Apparently, I listened to almost three full weeks’ worth of podcasts, but only about ten days’ worth of music. I published 9 conversations for my podcast. I had my heart broken. I found new love again. I spent time with my kids, with my friends, with my family. I don’t know how to summarize a year, except to say that I’m glad I made it through, and I’m glad you did, too.

I’ve missed writing these letters. I don’t know if I’ll be able to write more in 2024—though, then again, I’m not sure whether anyone wants or needs another newsletter filling up their inbox. But I have missed, too, sharing the things that I read or watched or listened to. Partly because I miss the sharing, and partly because I miss having the archive for my own reflections—looking back what I shared in a year tells me something about the flow of the year. I didn’t do a year-end round-up in 2022, but here are some things that I read, watched, and listened to in 2023 that mattered to me, in roughly the order in which I experienced them:

1. It took me almost six weeks to read Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah’s debut novel, Chain-Gang All-Stars, from mid-January to near the end of February. A near-future dystopian story about the prison-industrial complex, which also implicates the reader and our fascination with violence, it is not a light read. But it is a moving one.
2. If I recall correctly, I first heard about The War & Treaty’s album Lover’s Game via an NPR best-of list at the end of 2022. I liked that entire album, but the song that really stuck with me, that I have found myself singing over and over again, is “Yesterday’s Burn.” It sounds to me like a song of comfort from parents to a heartbroken child, and the strange and wonderful thing to me is that at this point in my life, I can feel it as both the younger and the older side of that relationship.
3. Actual-play RPG podcasts have been a staple of my listening for many years now, from The Adventure Zone to Dungeons & Daddies to Rude Tales of Magic and beyond. In 2023 I started listening to what might be the best-produced and best-acted D&D podcast I’ve yet encountered: Worlds Beyond Number. Moderated by Brennan Lee Mulligan and starring Aabriah Iyengar, Erika Ishii, and Lou Wilson (all veterans of the very popular Dimension 20), it strikes a really different tone from the other RPG shows I listen to. Though it’s often funny, it’s less rooted in comedy and more in storytelling, which has made for some truly wonderful moments.
4. I was a huge fan of boygenius’s self-titled debut EP back in 2017, so when I heard that they were putting out a full-length album (hat tip to Mel Thomas for mentioning it when we spoke for Keep the Channel Open), I was very excited. And what a great record it was. Each of the three singer-songwriters who make up the supergroup—Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridger, and Lucy Dacus—are talented and deservedly respected in their own right, but together they seem to lift each other to a new level. My personal favorite song on the album is “True Blue,” for what it’s worth.
5. April was a difficult month for me. One of the things that helped get me through it was listening to the entire run of my friend Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s old podcast Drunk Safari. I’ve talked about that show a lot over the years, including in this newsletter—about how funny it is, about how smart it is, about how much I like it. This year, it was a comfort to me, every episode felt like hanging out with friends. And at the time of this past year when I was at my lowest and loneliest, I really needed that.
6. It’s interesting to me that the two movies I feel compelled to include in this list are both anime. The first is Suzume—or, as it’s known in Japan, Suzume no Tojimari—directed by Shinkai Makoto. It’s difficult to describe this movie without giving much away, and just saying that it’s a story about a young woman meeting a mysterious young man and going on a magical quest together is entirely inadequate to the beauty of the animation, the potency of emotion in the story, and just the movie as a whole. It was one of the favorite movies of the year for both me and my youngest daughter.
7. As with a lot of media, I was somewhat late to Andor, the 2022 Rogue One prequel series centered on Diego Luna’s eponymous character, Cassian Andor. But I did finally finish watching it in May, and I think it was not only the most complex, interesting, and moving Star Wars story so far, but perhaps one of the most well-done stories of rebellion and revolution that I’ve seen.
8. In 2019, Amal el-Mohtar and Max Gladstone published one of my favorite books of the past decade, their sapphic, epistolary, time-traveling, spy-vs-spy novella This Is How You Lose the Time War. The book was very well-regarded at the time, winning both the Nebula and Hugo for Best Novella, and my impression was that it sold decently well but was not initially a bestseller. This past May, due to a random tweet from a person with the screen name “bigolas dickolas wormwood,” it rocketed up to the #3 book overall on Amazon. And let me tell you: the absurdity of the entire thing, the well-deserved attention for a book I deeply love, and the subsequent avalanche of memes made me incandescently happy.
9. I didn’t realize when I started this list that anyone would appear on it twice, let alone that a friend of mine would appear twice, but it must be said that Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s book The Siren, the Song, and the Spy was outstanding. The first book in the duology, The Mermaid, the Witch, and the Sea, was a swashbuckling adventure with pirates and assassins and mermaids and witches that was about imperialism and colonialism and the cost of violence—and I loved it. This second book picks up where the first leaves off, showing us both the allure and the oppression of empire, and both the necessity and grim reality of revolution. On top of which, it was highly entertaining.
10. The first season of Ted Lasso debuted during the pandemic, and was one of the last shows my kids’ mother and I watched together. The second season began airing three weeks after we separated. The third season started two weeks after our divorce was final. It is, in large part, the story of a man coming to terms with the dissolution of his own marriage, and so it was often a very emotional experience for me to watch this show. And yet it is a show that I deeply love, and for which I am grateful, one that made me both laugh and cry, and that ended, I think, just perfectly.
11. Marisa Crane’s debut novel, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself, imagines an America where a charismatic dictator has come to power, created a morality police with surveillance in every room of every home, and where criminals, deviants, and undesirables are marked by being given additional shadows. The world it shows us is both bleak and all too plausible. Yet it is also a story about the irrepressibility of human connection, and the ways that small graces, small joys, and small victories continue even when oppression seems implacable.
12. The Heart put out two very personal, very interesting, very moving series this year: SISTERS and DAD. The first is about the relationship between host Kaitlin Prest and her younger sister, Natalie, about codependency and mental illness. The second is about Kaitlin’s relationship with her father, their history, about emotional abuse, and about reconciliation. I found both of them incredibly moving.
13. I spent much of the last third of the year or so immersed in the game Baldur’s Gate 3. And, honestly, haven’t most of us wanted and needed to escape the real world this year, at least a little? That this game was able to deliver so many different experiences in one package was kind of amazing. It was an entertaining fantasy adventure. It allowed for all kinds of player-driven exploration and the closest thing to a true role-playing experience that I’ve ever gotten from a video game. It was often hilarious, not to mention extremely horny. And it also delivered some truly moving character moments. I spent more than a hundred hours in its world, and having finished it once, I’ve already started playing it again.
14. I think that the thing that I legitimately find most enjoyable and most comforting about the internet is just when it is weird and ridiculous for no reason other than to be weird and ridiculous. And so, I present to you: “Sitting,” by TJ Mack. You deserve to sit.
15. When I posted to social media that Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars would be my next read, one of my friends commented “it’s a book that really shouldn’t work but absolutely does.” On a different social media platform, someone commented “My brain keeps wanting to describe it in terms of TV and film. Third Rock from the Sun meets Lucifer meets The Red Violin meets Tangerine. But that’s not it at all,” to which I responded that I’d been thinking of it as “Your Lie in April x The Last Starfighter x Dr. Faust.” None of that does a good job of describing it, but it does get at why a description of the book would make you think it has at least two too many ideas in it. But not only does it work, it does so beautifully. Just an absolutely lovely story about music, immigrants and refugees, and self-acceptance.
16. The other movie I wanted to mention I saw just last month: Hayao Miyazaki’s latest, The Boy and the Heron. I’ve seen it twice now, and I do have to admit that it took two viewings for me to really get my bearings with the movie. It’s a poetic, impressionistic film that isn’t necessarily easy to get your arms around. But just in the same way that poems can make you feel things even when you can’t articulate what they mean, this movie managed to say things (I think) about legacy and mortality and grief and hope and healing in ways that I can’t actually explain. I don’t know if you’ll like it—I know many people have found it vexing—but I am glad I saw it, and I plan to see it again.
17. One of the things that has been deeply important to me over the past eight years has been having friends I trust, with whom I can talk about difficult political and world events. Over that time, there have been many people I’ve talked to about many different things, and while I value all of my friends and colleagues, the truth of the matter is that there are very few people with whom I can safely talk about everything. Honestly, there may not be anyone with whom it feels safe to talk about everything. But for each thing, there’s always been at least one person I can talk to, and that has meant a lot to me. Like a lot of us, I imagine, the thing that has been hard to talk about but that I’ve needed to talk about is Israel and Gaza. And I’ve been grateful to have friends with whom I can talk, particularly my friends Rachel Zucker and David Naimon.
    
    I know that this is a subject about which people disagree strongly, including, I imagine, people who may be reading this list. When people feel unsafe sharing their thoughts or feelings on the war, it is for good reason—no matter which “side” one is closer to, there is a real potential for violence. And so I have that in mind as I include the second part of David’s conversation with the writer Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger, in which they discuss the history of Israel and Palestine, the Jewish Labor Bund, and the duality of being both oppressed and oppressor. For me, this conversation was an example of people trying to hold two conflicting truths simultaneously, with sensitivity and nuance. But I recognize that not everyone will find it so—indeed, when I shared it on social media, it was met with some resistance. I don’t know how you will feel about this interview, or that I’m sharing it. What I can say for myself is that I appreciated it, I learned some things I didn’t know before, and that I’m proud to be David’s friend.
18. I’ve been a fan of Maggie Smith’s poetry for many years now, and on a personal level, she was very kind to me and very supportive when I was going through my divorce. Reading about her own divorce experience in her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, was rewarding for me, if also challenging at times. I don’t know if it is something specific to me that I couldn’t help mapping my experience and my marriage onto her story, or if that’s the most normal thing in the world. In the ways that our stories were similar, I felt seen. In the ways that they differed, I felt prompted to reconsider what I thought I knew about myself and my marriage and divorce. I think those are both valuable things that a book can do.
19. Finally, the last book I read in 2023 was Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. In one way, it’s a story about video games and the way they have impacted our lives and culture. In another, it’s a story about the creative process and collaboration. It’s also a love story, structured in very much the same way as would be familiar in any romance or rom-com, but centered around a friendship and work partnership rather than a romantic relationship. It’s also about family, both the families we come from and the families we create. It’s a beautiful story, parts of which made me angry or sad or tense, but one that I am so happy to have read.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me in the past year. There isn’t enough space or words for all of it. But if you’re reading this, even if it’s been a while since we last spoke, I hope you know that you matter to me as well. I know you’re doing your best, and I am, too.

The world is mostly awful, and probably getting worse. I’m sure I’ll write about that at some point. In the end, if we’re lucky, we’ll have the opportunity to take care of the ones we love, and share the happinesses that will always remain. For now, I think maybe taking care means giving you something that you can use, or that might make you smile. The world is mostly awful, but it will always be beautiful, too.

• This impromptu choir built over a few days this week on TikTok, and looking forward to each new part was almost as lovely as the song, itself.
• Maggie Smith’s poem “Sitting on an Old Bedspread Under an Oak Tree, Watching My Son’s Soccer Practice” described a feeling that I know all too well lately, and it made me feel a little less alone.
• The anime Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori is about a café in Japan, the four men who work there, and how they nurture and care for their customers through beautiful and comforting food and drink. It is soothing, sweet, cozy, and filled with a simple decency that felt like an oasis.

1. The single exclamation point in Mary Oliver's poem "I Know Someone."
2. There is this longing, I think, in Tami Haaland's poem "Not Scientifically Verifiable" about the separation between people. It's very sexy, too, I thought.
3. The way that Lisa Rhoades's captures the ephemeral moment of childhood in her poem "The Long Grass."
4. The last couplet, especially, of Rebecca Foust's poem "and for a time we lived."
5. Finally, Lyz Lenz's recent newsletter "Taking a Vacation at the End of the World": "It’s all grief. It’s some joy. And baby, I only know one way into the abyss and that’s head first."

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. Things are difficult and scary right now, I know. I'm doing my best to hold onto the ones I love, and to let go of what I need to let go of, and what needs me to let go of it.

Thanks, and take care.

1. The shadows and the softness of light in Lisa Sorgini's "Behind Glass" portrait series, reminiscent of Caravaggio, drew me in first. The sense of both isolation and connection, and the way it highlights the primacy of motherhood in this moment of history made me stay and look longer.
2. I lost my paternal grandmother last year, the matriarch of our family and the one from whom I learned about the Japanese American internment. So reading Maggie Tokuda-Hall's piece "Knowing Tama," seeing her grapple with what she can and can't know about her grandmother, was particularly poignant for me.
3. I love how attentive to the world Ada Limón's poems are, how open they are to what the world shows us, and how that openness can shake us out of interiority and make us bigger. Her poem "It's the Season I Often Mistake" felt like that.
4. I love how Gabrielle Bates' poem "Compassionate Withdrawal" seems to breathe, inhaling in preparation, hinging on a moment of blunt clarity, and then exhaling back into feeling.
5. I was absolutely delighted to see Ross Sutherland's podcast Imaginary Advice come back this week, and the first new episode (part 1 of a short series) is a spot-on and hilarious take on a Guy-Ritchie-style heist movie.
6. I loved how enthusiastic both Helena de Groot and Kaveh Akbar were in their recent conversation on Poetry Off the Shelf. And I loved the way Akbar talked about learning from his spouse how to look at the world as it is.
7. Finally, my son and I finished watching the slice-of-life anime School Babysitters last night. It was exactly the combination of heartwarming, wholesome, and hilarious that I needed right now.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my kids lately, and I'm grateful for it. I hope you have people in your life, too, for whom you're grateful.

Thank you, and take care.

1. The shadows and the softness of light in Lisa Sorgini's "Behind Glass" portrait series, reminiscent of Caravaggio, drew me in first. The sense of both isolation and connection, and the way it highlights the primacy of motherhood in this moment of history made me stay and look longer.
2. I lost my paternal grandmother last year, the matriarch of our family and the one from whom I learned about the Japanese American internment. So reading Maggie Tokuda-Hall's piece "Knowing Tama," seeing her grapple with what she can and can't know about her grandmother, was particularly poignant for me.
3. I love how attentive to the world Ada Limón's poems are, how open they are to what the world shows us, and how that openness can shake us out of interiority and make us bigger. Her poem "It's the Season I Often Mistake" felt like that.
4. I love how Gabrielle Bates' poem "Compassionate Withdrawal" seems to breathe, inhaling in preparation, hinging on a moment of blunt clarity, and then exhaling back into feeling.
5. I was absolutely delighted to see Ross Sutherland's podcast Imaginary Advice come back this week, and the first new episode (part 1 of a short series) is a spot-on and hilarious take on a Guy-Ritchie-style heist movie.
6. I loved how enthusiastic both Helena de Groot and Kaveh Akbar were in their recent conversation on Poetry Off the Shelf. And I loved the way Akbar talked about learning from his spouse how to look at the world as it is.
7. Finally, my son and I finished watching the slice-of-life anime School Babysitters last night. It was exactly the combination of heartwarming, wholesome, and hilarious that I needed right now.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I've gotten to spend a lot of time with my kids lately, and I'm grateful for it. I hope you have people in your life, too, for whom you're grateful.

Thank you, and take care.

1. Luisa Muradyan's poem "Quoting the Bible" turns twice, and the middle portion has this franticness that I recognized and which drew me in. But it's the ending I'm continuing to mull over.
2. Carl Phillips's poem "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors" feels apocalyptic to me, appropriately so. I think I've read it ten or fifteen times in the past couple of weeks.
3. Finally, I was recently introduced (via TikTok) to Nickel Creek's song "Can't Complain," from their 2005 album Why Should the Fire Die? What a gut punch of a song about an intense and deeply toxic relationship.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I hope you have someone to take care of you, even if it's just yourself. I know you're doing your best, and so am I.

Take care.

1. Luisa Muradyan's poem "Quoting the Bible" turns twice, and the middle portion has this franticness that I recognized and which drew me in. But it's the ending I'm continuing to mull over.
2. Carl Phillips's poem "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors" feels apocalyptic to me, appropriately so. I think I've read it ten or fifteen times in the past couple of weeks.
3. Finally, I was recently introduced (via TikTok) to Nickel Creek's song "Can't Complain," from their 2005 album Why Should the Fire Die? What a gut punch of a song about an intense and deeply toxic relationship.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I hope you have someone to take care of you, even if it's just yourself. I know you're doing your best, and so am I.

Take care.

1. The single exclamation point in Mary Oliver's poem "I Know Someone."
2. There is this longing, I think, in Tami Haaland's poem "Not Scientifically Verifiable" about the separation between people. It's very sexy, too, I thought.
3. The way that Lisa Rhoades's captures the ephemeral moment of childhood in her poem "The Long Grass."
4. The last couplet, especially, of Rebecca Foust's poem "and for a time we lived."
5. Finally, Lyz Lenz's recent newsletter "Taking a Vacation at the End of the World": "It’s all grief. It’s some joy. And baby, I only know one way into the abyss and that’s head first."

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. Things are difficult and scary right now, I know. I'm doing my best to hold onto the ones I love, and to let go of what I need to let go of, and what needs me to let go of it.

Thanks, and take care.

2021 has been the worst year of my life, at least so far. My dog died, I lost a friend to cancer, my grandmother died, I got a new job that turned out to be much more stressful than any previous job I've had, and, of course, my marriage ended. I'm not the type to look for silver linings or to minimize the pain I've felt. But it is also true that I have experienced some wonderful things this year, not least the support of friends and family, and the love between myself and my children. I have lost what feels like a lot this year, and it has made me all the more grateful for what remains, what has regrown, and what has newly come into my life.

Here are some things that mattered to me this year, in roughly chronological order as I experienced them:

1. 2021 was, among other things, the year of TikTok for me. So many of the most joyful things I've experienced online came via that platform, and it started with, of all things, a sea shanty.
2. The first book I read this year was Erin Morgenstern's fantasy novel The Starless Sea, which had in it a magical library in a hidden underworld, secret society intrigue, and all manner of literary, video game, and fairy tale references—which is to say that it was perfectly calibrated for me. Ultimately, it was a book about books and stories, and one that I found beautiful.
3. In February, I invited Gabrielle Bates (of The Poet Salon) to do a KTCO Book Club episode with me, and she picked Brigit Pegeen Kelly's poetry collection Song as her choice to discuss. Many of the poems have this dark, magical feel to them—particularly the title poem, which just haunted me.
4. At the height of last winter's COVID surge, when my anxiety was starting to become unbearable, I started listening to Theo Alexander's piano album Animadversions while I went for walks. It helped. And when I was at my lowest, unable to even get up off the floor, it helped calm me and bring me back to myself. I might have gotten through this year without it, but it would have been harder.
5. D&D-based comedy podcasts have been a staple of my listening this year. I just needed to laugh, you know? I started listening to Dungeons & Daddies in January and it rapidly became one of my favorites. It is rowdy and often vulgar, but also hilarious and often surprisingly touching.
6. Most of you probably know that I have been a long-time fan of David Naimon's podcast Between the Covers. He had a number of just knock-out episodes this year, but the one that I keep thinking about is his conversation with writer and photographer Teju Cole. I'm not exaggerating when I say it is one of the best podcast episodes I have ever heard in any genre. Such a wonderful, human, life-affirming conversation.
7. My favorite kind of criticism is the kind that isn't just a close reading but the kind that says "This is why this work is important to me." Anahid Nersessian's Keats's Odes: A Lover's Discourse is a perfect example of that. Remarkably, Nersessian not only showed me why Keats's poems mattered to her—and thus why they ought to matter to me—but she used a group of 200-year-old poems to tell her own story, too.
8. In looking back over my reading this year I noticed a few recurring themes, among them, stories about breakups and loss and aftermath. Jad Josey's flash fiction piece "You Will, You Will, You Will" was one such story, and a particularly beautiful, tender, generous one.
9. Beth Nguyen's essay "America Ruined My Name for Me" was a beautiful and nuanced piece about racism, foreignness, identity, and choice. I loved it.
10. Sarah Gailey's novel The Echo Wife is a gripping thriller about clones, with a memorable and utterly fascinating narrator. The story delves into trauma and asks the reader to consider how we got to be the way we are. It's chilling, often unsettling, compelling, and I think some of Gailey's finest work.
11. Jess Zimmerman's story "twisty little passages" takes its name from the 1979 interactive fiction game Zork, which also provides the story's form. The way the form invokes nostalgia to create a story about regret and the inability to let go is just breathtaking.
12. This spring, Helen Zaltzman released an episode of The Allusionist called "Additions and Losses," which is about the ways that people's attempts to express sympathy for disability or loss are often more about their own inability to sit with discomfort than anything else. It's a topic that I've had a lot of occasion to think about this year.
13. A friend emailed me in April with a link to the video for No-No Boy's song "The Best God Damn Band in Wyoming," a song about the true story of a swing band formed in the Heart Mountain Japanese-American incarceration camp. It's a catchy tune, and it's about an act of resilience and joy in the face of hardship and injustice. Obviously, it meant a lot to me.
14. By coincidence, I read Ada Limón's poem "The Hurting Kind"—which is about the loss of her grandfather—just a couple of weeks before my own grandmother died. "You can't sum it up. A life," the poem's speaker says. And it's true.
15. Jonny Teklit's poem "On Some Saturday, After All of This" was such a joyful, jubilant, love-filled poem that it brought tears to my eyes when I first read it. It still does.
16. Sarah McCarry's newsletter future recuperation is consistently lovely, and this year it continued to be so. Her letter "solstice," which went out in June, was about sadness and sailing and a sense of things ending, a small reaching from one person to another. "The grief in me sees the grief in you," she wrote. Sometimes that's all we want, really.
17. Late in her book Goldenrod, in her poem “Wild,” Maggie Smith writes “I’ve talked so much about loving the world / without any idea how to do it.” And this seems to me the crux of it, of both the book and perhaps of my experience of life. These poems struggle to love the world, and yet they do love the world, even if they don’t know how or why. And I think the struggle itself is an expression of that love, because to look at this shitty, painful world and decide to try to love it anyway may just be the most loving thing any of us can do.
18. The kids and I watched a lot of movies this year, and the one that stands out to me the most, for the beauty of both its animation and its story, is Song of the Sea. It's a fairy tale, based on the Irish legend of selkies, and the plot of the story follows a familiar children's adventure structure. But it's also a story about a family dealing with loss, children dealing with change, and acceptance as a path to healing. I just loved it.
19. I'd been missing Maggie Tokuda-Hall's podcast Drunk Safari, which ended in 2019, so when I heard that she and Red Scott would be starting a new show, Failure to Adapt, in which they argue about the relative merits of books and their movie adaptations, I was all in. And my goodness, it was exactly what I was hoping it would be: hilarious, delightful, and just a ton of fun.
20. The other D&D podcast I started this year was Rude Tales of Magic, and let me just tell you: this show gave me some of the biggest laughs of the year. I'm about eight episodes away from being caught up and I'm going to be bummed when I can't binge listen to it anymore.
21. In late August, I asked on Twitter, "Those of you who have been divorced, if you’re willing to share: what did you do with your wedding ring?" More than a hundred people responded, and their stories felt like a blessing.
22. Maile Meloy's story "The Proxy Marriage"—which I heard read by Ann Patchett on the New Yorker: Fiction podcast—is a story about love and friendship and society and war, a story which says profound things about all of those things and which also made me very happy.
23. Mikey Neumann's "Nihilism and Howl's Moving Castle" video posits a phenomenon he calls "situational nihilism." "We don’t choose to have no beliefs, they are taken from us," he says. "We didn’t choose this, the world did this to us." And yet, both in the movie he's discussing and in the real world, it's something we can recover from, especially when we come together with the ones we love. It's a surprisingly hopeful video, and one that I really appreciated.
24. Admittedly, I have been in a somewhat heightened emotional state for a lot of this year. So when I tell you that the most cathartic (joyful) cry I had all year was because of an anime about a high school bike racing club, you may need to take it with a grain of salt. But, man, I really loved that show.
25. Molly Spencer's poetry collection If the House kind of fucked me up. There is a feeling of incipience, of winter cold, to these poems, a feeling that spring may, yes, bring new life but also reveals what was hidden under the snow. And of a love that has become as skeletal as winter trees, about which I sense a tenderness, a wistfulness, but also a rage. Potent, beautiful, breathtaking poems.
26. Ben Kielesinski's TikTok is, for the most part, videos of him taking the viewer on walks out in gorgeous Pacific Northwest landscapes. If that sounds soothing, well, it is. Maybe that's exactly what you need. It was for me.
27. Michelle Poirier Brown's poem "Praise" is one of tenderness and gratitude and natural beauty. It's one where the sadness peeking out from underneath the gratitude only makes the resilience stronger and the beauty more urgent.
28. I heard Albert Garcia's poem "Offering" on an episode of The Slowdown, and there is something about the way it makes a small pleasure into something bigger, an act of service and love, which made me feel warm inside.
29. Last month, Sarah Gailey wrote one of the most resonant and profound descriptions of grief that I have read in a long time. The grief in me sees the grief in them. I hope their sorrow finds some solace, at least as much solace as their writing has given me.
30. I've been reading Monet P. Thomas's newsletter Away Again since it began. (Strange that it's already been almost four years. It still feels new.) About a month ago, she posted "An aside," and the wide spaces between the... paragraphs? lines? stanzas? Whatever you might call them, they made me stop and re-read six times. Just now I read them four more times.
31. I was just thrilled to see Sarah Hollowell's debut novel, A Dark and Starless Forest, hit shelves this year. And what a great debut it is, indeed. It has in it all of the things I've loved in Hollowell's short stories—magic, sisterhood, menacing forests, unapologetically fat characters—but expanded and given more room to grow and spread and take up space. What I particularly love about this story is how it is less about having the characters be good or make good decisions and more about having them do what they must and then have to live with both the benefits and the costs of those actions.
32. There’s a way in which the end of a serious relationship can shake your entire concept of yourself, and through your grief you have to find yourself again. That is, I think, what Yanyi's forthcoming poetry collection Dream of the Divided Field is about—though reducing it to being "about" one thing is doing the book a disservice. Here, Yanyi braids poems about heartbreak and implied emotional violence with poems about transition and immigration. Each has a similar but distinct sense of a loss of self, a search for self, a yearning for connection and belonging, a sometimes violent disconnection—to a partner, to a place or culture, to oneself and one’s own body. I can't wait for you to be able to read these poems.
33. Finally, I watched Encanto with the kids last night, the last movie I will have watched with them in 2021. And it was a wonderful way to cap off the year with them. A beautiful story about the ways that trauma echoes through generations, and how holding on too tightly sometimes only makes things fall further apart. Yes, I cried.

As always, this is just a portion of what mattered to me this year. Here's a thing I've been saying a lot lately: I know you're doing your best, and I am, too. If you're reading this, it's because both of us, you and I, we both made it through this year. And isn't that amazing.

However, this year has been for you, I hope that 2022 is easier, happier, more nourishing.

Take care,

1. Yanyi's recent letter, "How Do You Write About Joy" was a wonderful reminder. "The truly imaginative act, in catastrophe, is letting go of the promise of its end. It is to stop waiting for after in order to have now; it is to pause enough at existing where I am so I can acknowledge, and have, true joy."
2. I think Chloe N. Clark's poem "Yesterday I realized I wouldn't die" made a nice complement to Yanyi's letter. I love the idea of small wonders you keep in your pocket.
3. Hanif Abdurraqib and Pineapple Street Studios did a 2-part deep dive on The Fugees and their album The Scorev that was just magnificent.
4. David Naimon's conversation with Pádraig Ó Tuama was so good. The whole thing was great but I was particularly moved by how they talked about engagement without trying to change minds, and what real dialogue might look like.
5. There is a sadness I feel underneath Michelle Poirier Brown's poem "Praise," which just peeks out a little in the first and fourth lines. The whole thing feels to me resilient and hopeful in a wistful sort of way.
6. Sarah Freligh's poem "Wondrous" was on The Slowdown today and the way it turns at the end, revealing the wonder that can come on the other side of grief, that goes hand-in-hand with the sadness, was lovely.

As always, this is just a portion of what has mattered to me recently. I get to spend some time with family this weekend, and I'm looking forward to it. I hope that you can connect with the ones you love, too, whether in person or remotely.

Thank you, and take care.