This past week was kind of rough, starting with snow on Monday and a touch of something flu-like which hit me Monday evening and lasted until Thursday night. I only missed a day of work, but was housebound for the whole week, which has not happened to me since the downtown office reopened at the beginning of March. This enforced isolation allowed me more time to read and write, but I had no focus or energy so I mostly stared blankly at various screens and slept.

But yesterday the outdoor temperature rose above 80° f, so Z and I journeyed to Holland and spent several hours sitting in a friend’s back yard, talking and enjoying the unseasonably warm and wonderful weather. And that was as healing as any amount of ginger root, lemon juice, and whiskey.

A small yet elegant pile of books arrived at the house in this past week.

First up is the new issue of Peninsula Poets, the bi-annual publication of the Poetry Society of Michigan, of which I have been a member now for several years.

Next are two new books from The Center for the Art of Translation, On Lighthouses and Linea Nigra, both written by Jazmina Barrera and translated by Christina MacSweeney. On Lighthouses is the paperback version of the hardcover which arrived here in late 2020.

In reading news, I am still working my way through my back issues of Poetry Magazine. I have caught up to 2020, which means I have only a little over a year of back issues to read until I catch up to present. Oddly this feels like I am paying off a debt of some kind. I also took a day to read Colleen Alles’ After the 8-Ball, which I picked up last week at her poetry reading at Books and Mortar. It was brilliant! I love being reminded of the vast talent emanating from my group of friends and associates.

In writing news I am still keeping up my pace of a poem a day, though that went from literally a poem a day to a poem a day average when I missed my poems for Thursday and Saturday due to being sick and utterly brain-dead. But I made up the count with a couple of two-poem days, so I will still have thirty new poems to play with at the end of the month.