All I've been reading lately is the stupid
decline of America and how difficult it is to be a person
with skin in this society run by rich people with
nostalgic boners for slavery, misogyny, and illiteracy among the lower castes.
All of it's true. All of fills me with whatever 
snack is nearest me, as I never want to be caught
cooking when I'm angry and disenfranchised.
I'm going to keep reading the dire
but god I needed a break, and this was
a swig of Fernet. I assume it's what the Frat boys drink
when they grow out of Jaeger bombs and start trading
stocks at their father's firms. It's the most entitledly
flavored bitter I've allowed me lips to touch.
Not this book. Sorry. This book is great. 
This book is a shot glass full of Fentiman's Curiosity
Cola that Cohen dramatically downs at a bar, telling
you it's Fernet. But it's actually sweet and kinky,
a little more syrupy than you're used to
but it's also got that uncommon bite to it.
You initially might think you don't like it
because you know it's not something you can drink
every day or even every week but every once in a while
​you need something to jar you awake that isn't going to linger
​for the rest of the day reminding you of your futile mortality.

1. ...I Woke Up At Six Am As A Joke. What happens when you break an important routine? Like, you're definitely a night person who works a late night job but some times you have to get up super early. What does that do to your day?

2. ...I Went To The Gym With Someone I Had Sex With. Make a short list of things that you think "make you an adult" that most people never mention. Are you adulting?

3. ...My Therapist Told Me To Have A Drink. Start your poem by losing something in your home/apartment/trailer/car and end with a completely unrelated epiphany.

4. Italy. What behaviors do you exhibit when you're depressed that you wish you could change? Talk about whether you'd prefer someone to help you out of a funk or if you just want to be left alone.

5. There's No Such Thing As Overreacting, It's Called Reacting, Darling! What's the most annoying thing a doctor has ever told you. Were they right?

Where You Can Buy This: Penguin Random House

What You Should Read After:
Beau Sia's A Night Without Armor 2: The Revenge
Anne Carson's Norma Jean Baker Of Troy 
Mike Doughty's Slanky 
Tommy Pico's IRL 
Dorothy Parker's Enough Rope

Purchased: Button Poetry Website
​
Recommended By: I was purchasing other books from a project and needed another book to get free shipping. I looked up some of Collins's poems and thought this was the most promising. It turned out that I enjoyed it more than the other two books I ordered, even though those were also great.

Pages Of Poetry: 38

Recommended For: People looking for an in-depth book about grief that's complicated but not completely maudlin. This book doesn't linger at the funeral, doesn't spend all its time near a deathbed or sulking alone in a room. This book follows the griever into the outside world where they have to deal with grief while continuing to be a human trying to exist. If you're intrigued by the idea of a grieving person having a conversation with an Uber Driver on the way to an orgy, only to have the Uber Driver morph into the griever's dead mother, this is the book for you.

I am fresh from cleaning
Su Miller's house
when I read this. I mean it's been a year and some
months but I am still cleaning that house, and trying not to
picture my friends cleaning
my house while I am in a coma,
nobody sure if I'll live to see which items they chose to salvage
and which to leave
behind. I pick up this book when I am tired
of cleaning. Not Su's house but my own. Death
is not what I am in the mood to read about,
and yet I picked a book called Autopsy from the shelf
because I am an idiot. Grief abounds
but never wallows in this book.​

the visual/formatting changes/from poem to poem/like the landscape/of grief

1. Don't Tell Your Uber Driver You're Going To An Orgy. What medium or large size secret have you accidentally told a stranger that made them change their perspective on you? Which person in your life, living or dead, would that secret have provoked a reaction from? Morph the stranger to the family member for part of the poem.

2. Other Things They Would Have Found. Write a list of very specific things of yours that you would imagine someone would find after they discovered your body. No need to give context or how you think the person would react. Just a list of items.  

3. The Orphan Performs An Autopsy. Write an erasure of a well-known patriotic or religious song/prayer.

4. To Keep From Saying Orphan. What word that has been used to describe you do you dislike? What word would rather hear that fills a similar purpose? How would you transition people from the word you don't like to the one you'd prefer?

5. Grief Sestina. We're going to go basic for this: Write a sestina. (Link takes you to Terrance Haye's "You're Do It Yourself Sestina", which I find more helpful and in-depth than most instructions on how to write the form.

Where You Can Buy This Book: Button Poetry

What You Should Read After:
Daphne Gottleib's Final Girl
Ocean Vuong's Time Is A Mother 
Saeed Jones's How We Fight For Our Lives 
June Jordan's Directed by Desire

Purchased: Thrift Books

Recommended By: Valerie Loveland, who subscribes to Svalina's newsletter.

Pages Of Poetry: 154

Recommended For: Readers who enjoy writing that's quirky, and full of fantastic images and wordplay but which is also incredibly approachable. All of the poems in this book are a paragraph long. While it's fun to read the book as a whole experience, it's just as satisfying to pick it up and read a page or two at random.

My fiancé is the answer to a crossword puzzle. 25 Across: Who loves you unconditionally but never reads the poetry or graphic novels you recommend. He is one letter away from the  solution to yesterday's Wordle. I don't want to spoil it for you. When I stack books for potential purchase in whatever store is closest to wherever public transportation has taken us, he hunts imaginary monsters on his phone, saving the ones he thinks I'd be most interested in exchanging. Often, we hunt these cartoonish fictional monsters together. We are some peoples' idea of fictional monsters. Similar gender representation, different ages and physical attributes. They read a thousand year old children's anthology that was edited last century to claim people in similar-gender-relationships were monsters. Their judgement can't be trusted. I do trust Mathias Svalina's judgement. His lover is similar gender representation. Apart from that, I know nothing of either of them except what's in this book. I have read it twice. Each time I left with different Favorite Poems. There isn't a page in this book that I don't like. 

1. Wastoid. What animal or insect is the person you love the most? How are they similar? How are they different? How would you treat them if they were actually this animal?

2. Wastoid. What does the person you love create, either as a job or hobby? What part of them does that speak to? Is that type of creation something you have in common or is it something you wouldn't be at all interested in if they didn't do it?

3. Wastoid. A man gives birth to something very unusual. A ferris wheel, a dining room table, a fish tank full of docile pirahna. Forget the why and the how, tell us about this thing they birthed. Why is it so important?

4. Wastoid. A part of your body that is neither the heart nor the brain falls in love with a piece of art. Describe the experience.

5. Wastoid. You and the person you love the most are separated by a mile but following the same path. What do you do if you are ahead of them, to let them know you love them. If they are ahead of you, what have they left behind for you and/or where is the journey taking you?

Where You Can Buy This Book: Big Lucks Books

What You Should Read After:
James Gendron's Sexual Boat (Sex Boats)
​Kaleb Rae Candrilli's Water I Won't Touch
Phoebe Gianissi's Cicada
Catherine Cohen's God I Feel Modern Tonight
Bridget Lowe's My Second Work​

Purchased: Copper Dog Books

Recommended By: The cover caught my eye, and I flipped through it, and liked everything I read.

Pages Of Poetry: 78

Recommended For: Readers looking for direct, bite-sized slices of life that neither attempt to hide behind murky language or metaphors, nor spell out their message as though you were in some Intro To Humanity 101 class. Baer's work reminds me of talking with the friend who makes any story about their day mesmerizing whether it's taking their kid to the bus stop or how they had an epiphany while trying to split a check during a night out with friends.

​
​

The poetry section of the nearest bookstore where I worked was anemic. It wasn't terrible. The few books on the shelves were mostly things I enjoyed. There was just a lot of real estate in the bookstore devoted to YA books, romance, self-help, non-fiction, graphic novels, cookbooks, but not much devoted to poetry.

"I don't know that much about poetry," the owner said.

So we talked about poetry. Collections I liked. Books I thought would probably sell really well, even if they weren't for me.  Poets whose work every bookstore should stock up on. Which publishers' sites to peruse before going to the larger distributors.

"How do you decide which books to buy?" she asked, as I was flipping through books I was unfamiliar with.

"I start with the Acknowledgements. I look to see if they thank someone who I either know in real life or through their work. Do I enjoy the writers they thank? Does it look like namedropping? Take this one, for example," I said, opening up Kate Baer's book. "I don't know any of the poets she thanks but she thanks her editor and the cover artist, she makes a point to mention people who were specifically uplifting in her community, and she thanks an employee at the Panera where she writes. She sounds awesome. Then I flip through the poems in the book, and if I like more than I dislike/don't care about, I buy it. This one is going on the top of my pile."  

1. Author's Note. Forgetting the obvious Author is from here, this is their marital status, they have this many pets, and enjoy this sport or hobby what do you want readers to take away from your book/chapbook/collection? Be as serious or as snarky as you wish. But give potential readers a direct insight to your work that you feel isn't necessarily overt in you actual manuscript.

2. Ego. Create a three sentence poem. The first sentence should be a basic description of something odd about a previous or current relationship. The second sentence should zoom in and make the behavior feel off-putting. The third sentence should explain why you think the person exhibited that behavior towards you.

3. It's Like This. Think of a word that an author that you like uses so often that you notice how frequently it appears in the text. It doesn't have to be a drippy academic word like ostentatious, it can be the word bird or mother. What word do you think you use that often? What would happen if you used the other author's repeated word in place of your own?

4. Etymology Of The Word Wife. Take a common word and find out its original root. You can either offer only that root as your poem, or you can then try and trace that word's evolution from its origin to the way you and your family/friends/community use it.

5. What Children Say. Is there someone in your life that asks a lot of you, or constantly gives you advice, or is a running faucet of daily complaints? Take a single page and just write down the questions/phrases you remember. Offer no context. You shouldn't appear anywhere in the poem. This is just a one-sided conversation that you are listening to.

Where You Can Buy This Book: HarperCollinsPublishers

What You Should Read After:
​Mary Ruefle's Dunce
​Gregorz Wroblewski's Kopenhaga
Tracy K Smith's Life On Mars 
Hal Sirowitz's Mother Said
Rachel Long's My Darling From The Lions