Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

I have a confession to make. While I did originally start this slow reading project to tackle my teetering To Be Read tower, I may have mis-represented that nature of that pile by featuring actual books of poetry for the firs few weeks, rather than starting with the back-issues of Poetry Magazine which make up, by far, the majority of the things in my house which I haven’t read yet.

To come clean, the majority of my slow reading this year is going to be Poetry Magazine. If you’re here and not familiar with Poetry, then you have a treat in store for you. Ten times a year, the Poetry Foundation in Chicago has been putting out Poetry since 1912.

As they proudly say on their website, “…[Poetry] established its reputation early by publishing the first important poems of H.D., T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and other now-classic authors.” And the list of names throughout the past century and a bit continues.

As long as I have been a subscriber, the list of poets published in each issue has featured more first appearances in the magazine than poets who have been published in the magazine before. My first exposure to so many great writers has come in the pages of the magazine.

This issue introduced me to Will Alexander, a poet I can’t believe I hadn’t run into before. He’s published more than 30 books and is a novelist, essayist, playwright and visual artist as well as a poet. He is most often described as a surrealist poet and cites Rimbaud as the writer who turned him into a writer. Same, same Mr. Alexander.

I featured one of his poems as a daily striking lines post over on my bluesky. From “Ghostly Bonding by Kinetic:

Since the living body persists
as strange accelerated crimson

Mmmm, mmmm man do I love how those words work together, roll around in the mouth.

Thanks Poetry, I guess I am now going to go out and add his latest book, Divine Blue Light (for John Coltrane) to my TBR.