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

This book winds the award for spending the most time on my TBR hands down, by a country mile, it isn’t even close. How long has it been on the list, you ask? 20 years. yes, you read that right, TWENTY YEARS! Okay, I’m not being completely truthful here. It hasn’t spent 20 years ON the list, exactly, it has spent 20 years BEHIND the list. You see, at some point, not long after we moved into our house in 2006, probably while I was unpacking, this book slipped behind the bookcase. I only rediscovered it late last year when I was moving bookcases and books around consolidating the TBR mini-piles into one giant pile.

How do I know it has been 20 years? Well, Sue Sinclair read for the Olive Reading Series a couple of times back in the early days. One of the best things about organizing a reading series is that you can get poets to sign books when they come. This was the second time Sue read for the Olive and she was nice enough to inscribe this for me. She’s such a lovely person 🙂

I have a very distinct memory of listening to Sue reading from this book and the top of my head coming off, my brain rearranging itself, and my eyes working differently afterwards. I’m so annoyed that I lost this book for two decades.

Sue has a way with seeing things differently. Of crafting an image that moves from startling to subtle to revelatory. We all have those writers we discover when we’re young who expands our understanding of what poetry is and what it can be. If we’re lucky, we continue to bump into poets who do this to us throughout our reading and writing lives. The first fire was lit in me by Patrick Lane. A couple of years later, Pat Lowther. Sue Sinclair was the first poet my own age who did this to me. Her first book, “Secrets of Weather & Hope” changed how I read and write. If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading it, my call to action for you this week is to go out and get yourself a copy of both of these books. I’m so glad I finally got to ready “The Drunken Lovely Bird.”

If you follow me over on BlueSky, you already know I post lines I find striking every day as I slowly read through one book or issue each week. This week I’m going to include an entire short poem here for you.

Five O’Clock

The wind from the subway
smells of old clothes, of basements, of nothing
tired of being nothing.