By bell hooks

First, let me apologize for the spam post(s?) that have appeared on this blog (I was honestly mortified). I’m not sure how it happened; I’ve been working with WordPress to bolster the security, but I’m not fully confident it won’t happen again. I guess the only assurance I can offer is that it was probably fairly obvious that we are not trying to advertise Romanian casinos to you?

But also, I’ve been in a bad case of reader’s block lately. I’ve started three different books, and stopped less than halfway through each one, losing interest just to doomscroll twitter, tumblr, and reddit instead. I wasn’t sleeping all that well either, and it felt like part of the same thing: just a little too nervy to really relax.

In desperation to actually finish anything, I picked up the copy of bell hook’s Appalachian Elegy that a friend had given me for Christmas, hopefully last year though I can’t swear to it. I don’t really understand the vast majority of poetry but figured it might work as a palette cleanser of sorts for my brain. It is a very short volume: only 66 one-page poems total, but I took my time with it.

She covers the natural beauty of the Appalachians, and ties it into the people there, both past and present, and the opportunities and oppressions that those people have faced. It is a lot to cover, and yet the poems feel airy and lyrical at the same time. I only read 5 or 6 poems each night, stopping when I felt myself either zoning out or trying to rush through the words, and slowly felt like I was starting to unwind. I still struggled with feeling like I was missing the deeper meaning, and I very likely am, but just the words and rhythms became enough for me. I am still struggling to concentrate on anything longer, but this has certainly helped and I hope to remember to turn to poetry in the future as well.