Unlikely Pairings

I've never been good at the elevator pitch or the Twitter (RIP) bio or anything that pragmatically constrains my identity (professional or otherwise). Instead, I like to tell people that I am intellectually promiscuous. I am interested in and working on a great many things.

On the one hand it is a lively and joyful state of being and on the other hand it attenuates the amount of time I can spend on any one particular thing. Authentic progress is always slow, but when you are working across disciplines, it's even slower. And when you add in the caregiving dimension, it can sometime feel like there's no movement whatsoever. I was really drawn to my colleague, Amy King's recent Substack about Matriarchal Refusal. The act of movement, no matter how small, is a resistance, a desire path worth walking.

This week I learned I was once again an Honorable Mention in the Alan Gingsberg Poetry Prize, an honor I have received once every decade since 2009. Although my 2026 poem "Cycling" won't be published in The Paterson Literary Review until 2027 (this is the norm in literary publishing), I can share my first honorable mention from this competition from 2009.

At the time I was working at a school that was organizing a cookbook fundraiser and my students asked the faculty to each contribute a recipe to the cookbook. If you know me, you know that I mostly cook for survival, not pleasure. So, instead of a recipe, I gave them this poem and they included it in their cookbook. I don't have the cookbook anymore, but I still have my copy of The Paterson Literary Review.

This poem was published a decade before I would live through a global pandemic. If I were to ever republish this poem in an anthology or in a poetry collection, I would change Spanish Influenza to a more generic Influenza. Otherwise, I think it's held up well over time.

While continuing to work on poetry manuscript submissions and the long haul revision of my miscarried manuscript, I've also been working on research projects related to AI, writing, and companionship. I look forward to sharing more on the AI research next month.

But I've also been reading a lot of good books!

My reading list typically skews nonfiction and is a bit eclectic, but I am always fascinated by the thematic strands that emerge when you pair books that on the surface don't appear to have anything to do with one another. Here are some books worth reading side-by-side.

Everything Is Tuberculosis and Gwyneth

John Green, famed YA author of The Fault In Our Stars among other books, follows the story of Henry, a young TB influencer in Everything Is Tuberculosis. Green contextualizes the history of TB alongside his (and likely the reader's) ignorance of the persistent threat of the global TB epidemic. All kinds of things like the cowboy hat and Gone With The Wind can somehow be linked to TB and TB underscores most of the policies we have in the US around food and drug regulation. But it's Green's insistence on using the megaphone he has been granted from his own social media celebrity to not just amplify Henry's voice, but to remind us to think in the plural. The solutions for TB are not out of reach, but they are too enormous for any single individual to grasp. This does not mean we shouldn't reach, but that we should understand that our collective effort matters more than our individual effort. He's realistic about what his (and Henry's) efforts can achieve through social media alone.

And yet, it is the raw milk privilege explored in Amy Odell's biography Gwyneth that underscores how the amplification of monolith voices has also destabilized progress on eradicating TB. Despite Odell's best efforts, no one from Gwyneth Paltrow's team participated in the biography, so Odell's portrait of Gwyneth is divided into two segments. The first uses primary print sources (magazines, etc) to paint Gwyneth's early years of childhood to her Oscar win and Weinstein era. Then the narrative shifts and Gwyneth becomes less of a character than a corporate idea because Odell can only rely on sources from Paltrow's lifestyle brand Goop and her social media accounts. These accounts often promote controversial health content to provoke reader engagement and in turn profitability, the most infamous being content extolling the benefits of unpasteurized milk.

But if you read Gwyneth alongside Everything Is Tuberculosis, it demonstrates how the option to drink raw milk and gain any possible benefits can only exist alongside the health and safety infrastructure we have in the US that would allow one to take that risk. These books underscore the ambivalence of social media, the tool that is simultaneously attempting to solve and undermining the TB crisis. Perhaps we, the lurkers, the majority in the social media atmosphere, are the answer, if only we can work together offline.

Ask Not and The Aviator and The Showman

I read Maureen Callahan's Ask Not alongside my book club a few months back and now that I'm just finishing Laurie Gwen Shapiro's The Aviator and the Showman I'm struck by the pantheon of 20th Century women whose celebrity and violent deaths are at the hand of ambitious men. The magnitude of the effect can only be felt when you read these books concurrently. Consistently, across both texts, we see how the celebrity status of women like Marilyn Monroe, the Bessette sisters, and Amelia Earhart, among others, depended on a domestic violence that ultimately consumed them.

I'll be back next month with some AI insights.

Thanks for walking beside me,

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