As of 17:00 on Friday, July 1, 2022, I am on vacation for two weeks. This is my first significant break from work since the Christmas holidays, and it is long overdue. I don’t have any particular plans beyond heading out of town with Zyra for a couple of days when her schedule allows. I hope to find time to read, write, and hang out at the lake until my head is clear of work stress and I am re-centered and ready to resume the daily grind. Then again, two weeks is likely nowhere near enough time for that.

This week’s only new arrival is the new issue of Poetry Magazine, the July/August issue, which was the last volume of words I read to completion in the month of June.

In reading news, I picked up Andrés Neuman‘s How to Travel Without Seeing, which arrived at the house at least six years ago from my old subscription to Restless Books. Ostensibly a collection of essays, this book reads more like a collection of journal entries focused on each of the many countries Neuman visits over the course of the books. And that could very well be what they are, though the cumulative effect is less travelogue and more lyric essay or prose poem. Neuman writes beautifully, and his translator Jeffrey Lawrence deserves serious props as well.

In writing news, not a lot going on. The past several weeks of work have been exhausting and what little free time I usually have has been put to use assisting Zyra with the many and varied events in which she and her company Gallafe have been participating. I have managed to transcribe a few more of my April poems, and even made some notes for a couple of new pieces, but I just haven’t had the mental and emotional space to do anything more than the occasional entry in my journal.