My book, How to be Good is out this week from @beemonkpress. I'm afraid the only wisdom I have, after 30+ years of thinking about how to be good, is that being good is hard and we should be kind to each other. beemonkpress.com/david-banach/

#sealeychallenge Day 31 Kim Addonizio, Exit Opera This simultaneously sad and funny and entertaining book about endings is the appropriate last entry for my Sealey month.

#sealeychallenge Day 30 Sophie Cabot Black. Geometry of the Restless Herd The pastoral, with the balance predator and prey, and the equilibrium of use and care has long been a rich metaphor for society, for relationship, and for the little Eden of life we share here.

#sealeychallenge Day 29 Rumi, translated from the Farsi by Haleh Liza Gafori, Gold I heard the translator of these classic Rumi poems read some of these a while ago, and was amazed at how they came alive with rhythms you don’t usually hear in the common translations.

#sealeychallenge Day 28 Danez Smith, Bluff These poems feel even more topical after the recent shooting in Minnesota, and they struggle with how to write poems that feel fresh and do justice to the repetition of events and circumstances that overwhelm us even with just one repetition.

#sealeychallenge Day 27 Anne Carson, Wrong Norma A new book by Anne Carson is so exciting that I have been saving it for the last part of the Sealey month as a treat for myself, and what a delight it was.

#sealeychallenge Day 26 Tiana Clark, Scorched Earth

#sealeychallenge Day 24 Mark Pawlak. Away Away These are poems about travel and observation and the in-between spaces we encounter in the going from place to place and from moment to moment.

#sealeychallenge Day 23 Major Jackson, The Absurd Man As someone who studies Camus, I enjoyed this take on what the absurd artist can be, devoid of another world, devoid of a home, and devoid of objective standards that will justify him.

#sealeychallenge Day 22 Abbie Kiefer, Certain Shelter This book evokes memories of a vanished Maine, a lost mother, and the way the past still lives in us as we revitalize our homes and ourselves.

#sealeychallenge Day 21 Roberto Harrison, Isthmus to Abya Yala This is a beautifully produced volume from City Lights Books that includes drawings by the author. Abya Yala is a land of abundance and fulfillment in the language and culture of the Guna people of Panama.

#sealeychallenge Day 20 Blas Falconer, Rara Avis The title poem of this masterful and deeply felt collection describes the falcons buried along with the bodies of Egyptian pharaohs, reminding us both of the pharaoh and the beautiful rare birds we all carry through life.

Tune in to WSCA 106.1 FM, Portsmouth Community Radio, this Thursday at 8 a.m. - PSNH will be talking NH Poetry with Larry and Kelly, the hosts of "Seacoast Currents"!

#sealeychallenge Day 19 Madeleine Cravens, Pleasure Principle @madeleinecravens The title of this ... Read more: https://longer.blue/posts/_qpu8ySC5l

#sealeychallenge Day 18 Oliver de la Paz, Diaspora Sonnets I know I am late to get on the train fo... Read more: https://longer.blue/posts/iLFsicquYP

#sealeychallenge Day 17 Silas Denver Melvin, Grit @sweatermuppets I’ve always loved the language of this poet, the staccato rhythms and the cartwheeling, tire-screeching, donut-driving metaphor switches. These poems, even when describing gut-wrenching realities, are a delight to read.

#sealeychallenge Day 16 Jennifer Jean, Object Lesson This 2021 volume does the job of poetry, telling the truth and the truth behind the truth, in this case about the sexual exploitation of women. They make the connection between the humanity in these women and our own shine forth so clearly.

#sealeychallenge Day 15 Catherine Barnett, Solutions to the Problem of Bodies in Space This is a book about loneliness, about death (of a father and of a friend), about the phenomenology of being alone and of desire, and about that fundamental human paradox:

#sealeychallenge Day 14 Robin Gow, Lanternfly August @robin_gow_poet This beautiful and well-crafted book takes the lanternfly as an extended metaphor for being trans and for going home to place that is no longer home. I loved this smart and deeply felt book, a highlight of my month so far.

#sealeychallenge Day 13 Anne Waldman, Mesopotamia I heard a recording of Ann Waldman reading this summer for the first time, and it rocked my world. You can still hear that same urgency and fire in these poems. I pre-ordered the Kindle version, so this is hot off the press.

#sealeychallenge Day 12 Alice B. Fogel, Falsework These are poems of a mature and wise person asking, as we all must do, how to structure a life within this world when the things we thought might place us and hold us up turn out to be falsework, and we have to find our place again.

#sealeychallenge Day 11 Cintia Santana, The Disordered Alphabet The powerful sounds and disrupted syntax in these poems push language beyond meaning. There are themes of grief and loss and atomic energy, but the stars of this book are the sounds and where the language leads us. @thesealeychallenge

#sealeychallenge Day 10 Lydia T Liu. The problem of deer This chapbook is full of sensory details and scientific curiosity. From the nature of odor and color to figs to monarch butterflies to Snowy Owls, these poems aim to understand, and they aim at what goes beyond understanding.

#sealeychallenge Day 9 Mosab Abu Toha, The Forest of Noise This collection does the work of remaining present in Palestine and describing the way that war and violence are woven into every facet of daily life. @thesealeychallenge

#sealeychallenge Day 8 Andrea Lawlor, Position Papers This slim but potent volume is a series of prose poems with ideas for a utopian society. This 2016 book feels even more necessary now, when we so need the ability to believe that there can be a different future and that it will be wonderful.

#sealeychallenge Day 7 Fady Joudah, […] This book is even more timely and necessary given the continued famine and genocide going on now in Gaza. It points the way to engagement with events that overwhelm our hearts and minds and hands without losing hope or the capacity to love.

#sealeychallenge Day 6 Vievee Francis, Forest Primeval This 2016 book is full of sumptuous lyric poems that make you grateful to have a body and mouth to articulate itself around them. They investigate the dangers and attractions of desire and violence, pleasure and pain.

#sealeychallenge Day 5 Charles Douthat, Again This is a carefully crafted book of memories of the lives and deaths of a father, mother, and alcoholic sister, and the life and grief that comes after. These meditations were meant for all of us who love and lose and manage to live and love again.

#sealeychallenge Day 4 Keetje Kuipers, Lonely Women Make Good Lovers I needed so much the way these poems lead to a renewed commitment to the leap of loving and living as if there were no tomorrow, even as it asks us to keep loving the body, the choices, and the past faces that hurt us.

#sealeychallenge Day 3 Dan Beachy-Quick, The Thinking Root It was a revelation and a joy to see the fragments I knew translated with a poet’s ear and arranged from a wide variety of sources in ways that made sense and had a poetic progression. Selections: 1. Empedocles 2. Empedocles3. Parmenides