Now, before Yahdon details why he chose this month’s pick, book club member Jake gives a recap on June’s meeting.
When Yahdon kicked off the June’s meeting discussing Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass” with the prompt of “what is some of the language you got from the book that helped you see the natural world in a new way?” No one in the (virtual) room expected to hear the author’s prose about nature compared to Jay Z and DMX bars, but that’s exactly what the human highlight reel Eggie did. Only at Literaryswag Book Club.
In the midst of a heat wave hitting both the east and west coasts, the conversation centered around personal relationships with the environment, especially when living in a capitalist society, the recognition that humans are not the only living beings with worth. We spoke on the ways in which each of us can practice the idea of “honorable harvest,” never taking more than you need. We wrapped up with Yahdon posing the question, “how do we put what we’ve learned from the book into practice while balancing out our daily needs in life with a desire to do right by the natural world?”
The July pick for 2021 is Natalie Diaz's 2021 Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem.
As poetry collections are less dense than other genres, like novels and memoirs, I typically pick them towards the end of the year where the demands of the holidays, along with everything else, can make completing a book with more words and pages difficult.
This year I wanted to see what kind of conversation would occur if we read a poetry collection in the middle of the year. What language and ways of seeing could this collection provide us on the month of the founding of this country?
For those of you who may have seen this word, figured they knew what it meant in context, but never were sure about a working definition, Postcolonial is the period in which we reckon with the consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized people and the land they lived on. Think of it like an existential debrief. Instead of just moving into some arbitrary "future" that suggests time as linear, a postcolonial framework challenges us to understand and interrogate how we internalize the power structures that impose their wills on us.
Diaz's collection does more than reify the notion of what was taken from the victims of colonization but subverts, in language and in line, the idea that colonization is an irreversible process, or that power is static:
“I’ve been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
These are only the first few lines in the first poem, so you can imagine the collection is like a Stevie Wonder album, Hotter than July.”
A note on reading poetry: if this is your first poetry collection, or you're someone who finds poetry "difficult", or "intimidating", you are not alone. I'll share some insight from Gregory Pardlo, another poet, who provided perspective that enabled me to understand that which I previously couldn't. Unlike fiction and non-fiction which you can choose to read more than once, if you enjoyed it, poetry is designed for us to read it more than once. That's why the books are so thin. You're supposed to spin the block more than once. Reading a poem more than once is not a defect of poetry; it's the feature.
Think of poetry like your favorite album whose words you're trying to memorize. You listen to it over and over to remember what your favorite artist said, and also to learn about all the ways saying something is possible.
I'm hyped to see what you catch, what poems you find yourselves reading more than once and what you see on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th trip around the block.
This meeting takes place via Zoom, Wednesday, July 28th, 7pm [EST].
Members, be on the look out for the email with your link to access the meeting.
See you there!