A Call for Revolution

This book is a short, impassioned and timely reflection from His Holiness the Dalai Lama - as the title suggests, calling for a global insurgency - albeit one of empathy, of deep love for all beings and our shared world, for compassion, forgiveness, listening, breaking down the walls of the mental prisons we have traumatized ourselves into inhabiting across our history and creating spaces for new, urgent possibilities. It is a call I very much endorse.

No-one is too small to make a difference

This book is a collection of speeches made over this past few months by Greta Thunberg - whom you've probably heard of by now, unless you've been living under Boomer Snowflake Rock - since pretty much all of these speeches are available online or were covered in the news media, the only real reason I can envision buying a copy of this book might be for someone a necessarily recommendable act is as a present for people living under that aforementioned rock. Not that they'd probably read it, because hey, who's going to listen to an autistic Swedish teenager if you're already not going to listen to a united consensus among our planet's most dedicated minds on questions of ecological action?

Letters to a Young Poet

This book, a collection of letters written from Rainer Maria Rilke in response to one Franz Kappus, who was studying* at the same military academy Rilke had, and wanting to become a poet, reached out to his school's most famous-thus alumni: you can guess who. It is not super easy reading - Rilke was a master wordsmith as well as a pretty mentally troubled and emotionally complicated man, and while the overall tone of his letters is of an immense generosity of spirit and optimistic view of man, nature, art etc; the tortuous route he makes it sound like to truly go into and get to know oneself in objective truth at all enough to make a halfway interesting poet - it is, he repeatedly states, a role one can only take up by committing oneself endlessly to purity of perspective, to unlearning and relearning and revising and revolting, to solitude so deep that one's own thoughts burst out of you and onto a page with such urgent strength that to suppress them would be suicide. These letters are a potential goldmine for those who want to devoutly follow the classic (and dumb) trope of the 'tortured artist'; who prioritises their inner struggle above all else as it feeds their work; but however much he could've benefited and probably lived longer with a bit of therapy the general views offered here by Rilke are not, I don't think, supportive in themselves of this view, but are provocative, spiritual even, in ways that are challenging & ambiguous - and as a poet should know, Results on Readers May Vary.

* There is appended another longer essay, which may Rilke wrote to one 'Mr V.', entitled Letter from a Young Worker - which delves into much more sociopolitical critiques of the hegemonic repressive Christian ethics and expectations, especially around sexuality and personal expression; he rails against the hypocrisy and cultural stagnation he sees as being symptomatic of this deeper religio-philosophical malaise.

milk and honey

This book by Rupi Kaur is among those gigantic few poetry books of the past decade that are responsible for helping mass-popularize poetry among new audiences - namely, people who search through self-affirmation/breakup/trauma hashtags on Instagram.* My thoughts on this book may come across as sounding priggish and judgmental but I'd like to try to assure the reader this is far from the case. Okay - so I really genuinely 100% do not think the poems in this book are that good. Most** read more like a youth's private derivative heartbroken scribbles than anything of any particularly noteworthy originality or heft. That's not to say they're bad - it just requires one to step back and ask what poetry is for - moreso, who it is for.

   I'd say it's for everyone. Does that include people who have never really cared for poetry*** but who share similar traumas to an artist willing enough to expressively carve out the niche of their own struggles and recovery to help others reflect on their fundamental similitude? Yes, absolutely. And those folks, speaking objectively from the sales statistics, wanted a book of poems that apparently didn't exist before this one - and how many people do you think were inspired to process their own traumas, plot out their own paths to wholesomeness, forgiveness, forgetting or wellbeing, through their own bespoke lenses of creative writing - by this very book? The figures here don't even bear estimating but by my very asking even if the answer were to be Just One you'd know it's a worthy attributation of priceless evidence that this book - whatever the haters in their ivory towers wanking off to T.S. Eliot's most obscure & esoteric academica might say - has DONE something good, and that is infinitely better than everything said by the critics**** who would be the arbiters of Is [x] Thing Good.

   This is my blog and I will arbite here: this is a very good book and would make a strong heartfelt present to anyone (even if they don't generally give a hoot about poems) who is going through a rough patch after surviving abuse or having a bad breakup. Kaur's poems will sit with readers through their grief and may genuinely help disentangle webs of self-doubt, fear or other negative emotions, and they won't even have to keep cross-checking Sparknotes to ensure they're following their feels-journeys properly.

* Don't @ me, it's a big fucking market

** I say most because there are quite a few that I properly enjoyed too, for their creative content and not just pathos-bombing.

*** And for many people rightly so, because maybe for they the sole initial means of encountering poetry has been through rigorous pointless academic study and never for enjoyment or personal growth or exploration. Do you think some of the people who read milk & honey who had never read a poetry book before went on to read more poetry and found that in fact they found poets who they decided were better than Rupi Kaur? Maybe! Does this make Kaur less of a fantastic poet for having created a book which both helps people & induces them onwards into the world of words?

**** Yes, I am fully aware that I do write a whole blog effectively critiquing every book I read - but I approach the entire endeavour rather laxly, and always try to consider context & intended audience & such with stuff, and don't usually rate the books rather preferring to recommend who might enjoy it and for what - so I'm not really a critic, more a sort of pan-biblioliterary speculative cartographer.

Single-Minded

This book by Kate Wharton is about singleness; a vital counterpoint to the mass of extant Christian literature about its alternative. Rooted in personal experience to demonstrate the veracity of her case, as well as very much in Scripture - the "ideal" individual disciple's experience of primary intimacy with God in Christ rather than any worldly relationships - throughout she makes powerful arguments and highly encouraging ones to anyone who, like me, may have felt somewhat left out of the all-too-often world-conforming Christian culture of "oh well we may as well get married to someone as soon as possible because isn't that just what all the nice Christian couples at church have done?"
   It's likely to be an uncomfortable read for many on that side of the divide just as much as it is an affirming one for single people: but Kate's right in saying that Jesus very much emulated the ideal of a single life, well kept and well lived, to and for God alone; it's a message so deeply counter-cultural both inside and outside of the Church & I can only applaud her for having put forward the view so poignantly as here given the fat enormity of this particular lacuna not only in Christian literature but most church communities too.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

This book is of course the children's classic by Lewis Carroll - & I'm not going to talk here about the literary impacts of nonsense writing, nor the many & myriad cultural spinoffs or references strewn across Western book/screenwriting like flecks of shit out of a hippo's arse aimed across the wasteland of post-Victorian Anglophone normativity, nor even the whole paedophilia question; because this YouTuber has already done a better job talking about these things than I could be bothered to do.

   One thing I will talk about instead is that recently, and I forget the context exactly of how or why or if this revelation was prompted, but smack-bang in the middle of my inner angstful dithering over whether & when to come out as non-binary, my dad told me that had I been born without my Y chromosome my name would've been Alice - and this was - a lot, as discerning empathic readers will probably long have realised that I've been well on my way down a variety of rabbit-holes anyway and my life is even to me somewhat topsy-turvy nonsensical at the best of times.

   I can't think of an appropriate segue for this but I'm mentioning it anyway - I've been fired.* Yes, from my dream job that I was really quite good at and had foreseen as being as close to a lifelong fruitful career as someone like me was likely to find - without moving to London, which is still very much fuck that. I don't know what the next chapter is apart from it definitely entails moving out of my flat that I can't afford anymore. I can't say however that I don't know why this happened. It happened because my mental health has been All Over the Damn Place recently and I've been too irregularly unreliably missing days at work given this, and have consistently failed to develop means of communicating with the rest of my team in mitigating any inconveniences this causes to our work. I got my first formal disciplinary warning less than a month ago, and my head being where it is at the moment, I think part of me just went "okay this is happening, fuck it" and I've got the second and third-final within an impressively neat time-frame.** It sucks. I will miss that job, that whole office, like anything, and I really hope that in time God will help me to work through my shit enough to even get a handle on why it all happened the way it did. But for now, I can only press onwards, through the mystical horrible wonderland that is my life, in the hope that things will get - if not easier or better - then at least clearer.

* I mean, not like right now, I'm on holiday with my family at the moment. But last week.

** As I don't want to run any sort of risk of people thinking I'm bitter or trying to slate the Church Army folks or their HR personnel here, let me state that they've handled things with incredible patience, generous kindness and proper formality.
   The first warning only came in after the problems kept manifesting when they'd already given me several sessions of counselling, which weren't much help, and repeatedly asking me what if anything they could do to help my situation, which I could only say I didn't know, as I don't. Tim, Faye, Mark, Des, Andy, Neil - you have my utmost apologies, thanks, and sincerest reassurance that I hold nothing against anyone and you made the right call. If I wasn't as mental as I obviously must be I'd have fired me too.

the Saint of Milk and Flames

This book, a collection of poetry by the fantastic Kate Garrett,* is among my favourites of recent reading. I read the whole thing in one sitting while on a family holiday, going back during that same long weekend to re-read certain poems over a third or seventh time.** Its themes are broad and deep, touching on faiths lost and wavering and refound, the human challenges of self-realization as mother or daughter, the isolations and solidarities found in disability and disappointment - ultimately there is a strong vein of hopeful healingness throughout and the subtleties herein should prompt most discerning readers to reexamine their lives through lenses of everyday myth, reverent grief and life-affirming love.

* To whom apparently I am 'grand-padawan', she having mentor-inspired my own primary mentor-inspiration in the spoken word world Kinsman.

** Including possibly my favourite of Kate's poems that I've read thus far - Everyone needs a friend when the world begins to end, which for my money sums up the beauty of poetic community in these strange dark times better than anything.