Samara Rafert

Glenwood Springs Co. July 1984. photo by Mark Williams. I was apparently working on a song that became Maps & Legends. Thanks Mark!!

Have you ever seen a snake eat a mouse and thought how unpleasant it must taste? How their mouths mostly come into contact with fur and nothing delicious?

Don’t feel too bad for them. Most snakes barely have any taste receptors. Most don’t even have the genes for tasting umami or sweetness.

ERASING STARS. A teacher of standing, a poet, tells her class, Never put stars in your poems, and some of the students write this down. And some stop writing after a year or two. And some get married or take jobs selling pharmaceuticals. And some think Time is in short supply, and ex cathedra take up parent worship. I know a Baltic poet who draws Egyptian star charts on cocktail napkins as he answers questions. I also know a poet in Tucson, an amateur ornithologist who believes that stars influence birds. “Of course,” he says, “the carbon in our brains comes from stars.” Erase stars from a page. Nothing happens. The allotropic pulse of mathematics ticks anyway. But now try putting the stars back in. It can’t be done. This failure has nothing to do with personal habits. Stephen Kuusisto

“A teacher of standing, a poet, tells her class, Never put stars in your poems, and some of the students write this down. And some stop writing after a year or two. And some get married or take jobs selling pharmaceuticals.” —Stephen Kuusisto, “Erasing Stars” @coppercanyonpress.bsky.social

Congrats to my friend and colleague extraordinaire Elizabeth!

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Every time I see Buttons the passenger pigeon at @ohiohistory.bsky.social I feel like I commune with him a little and feel so sad

I did not like him talking jive
I did not like him on a drive
I did not like him while alive

Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays A memoir in essays that examines love, marriage, and identity in light of a spouse’s transition, asking what happens to us when the people we are closest to change.

Seeing @people.com include Lynette D'Amico's exquisite, funny, cutting memoir, MEN I HATE, on its books page in the new issue is super cool and … definitely one of the biggest surprises of my career! Book World may be gone but dammit, we still have People. ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Fetid Rivalry

“Sun Ra: Do the Impossible” debuts tonight on PBS.

Great companion reading below from Michael Lowenthal @pbs.org @ohiostatepress.bsky.social @rafertess.bsky.social

"The possible has been tried and failed. Now it’s time to try the impossible."
— Sun Ra

Sure hope you're coming into the office tomorrow

This is the point that I wish everyone could see more clearly. The problem is hed & dek, which are all most people see.

"I also want authors to know that a book can still succeed in the absence of traditional reviews, and while the acknowledgment that comes with a review is fantastic, its impact is not certain." open.substack.com/pub/derekkri... @derekkrissoff.bsky.social

I’d mix it up a bit. Cats are the gorgeous stoners who maintain a firm suspicion of the world and cuddle selectively. Dogs are the restless, tamed man-eaters who eat absolutely anything including books. One howls at the moon; the other admires it.

"As the AI agents played—1,000 games per set of rules—the researchers tracked how the pieces moved. Then they compared the moves with the levels of wear on areas of the board, tracing which gameplay seemed to replicate grooves on the stone."

I'm pretty proud of this poem I made out of the euphemisms that companies used to describe the ICE occupation in corporate communications. Also read the whole story: racketmn.com/corporate-co...

So I wrote this "don't panic quite so much about the data center boom" newsletter that turned out to have posted on the day of the endangerment finding rule change. Is this bad timing--although unintentional--on my part? Yes. Yes it is.

"There are still plenty of places to read about literature, many of them excellent.... But they are produced for an audience that already knows it cares about literature. The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits."

I'm going to write one long thread over the next couple of days about the people I worked with at the Post. They deserve the extra time and attention. I'll start with someone you likely know well: @roncharles.bsky.social 1/TK

A few weeks left to submit your story collection to the Grace Paley Prize for Short Fiction (which comes with $5,500 and publication from us, Mad Creek Books): awpwriter.org/AWP/Contests.... Submit your manuscript by the end of the month! @ohiostatepress.bsky.social

The Memoir Land Author Questionnaire 176: Michael Lowenthal "The book recounts my journeys of dislocation and relocation, geographic as well as familial, artistic, sexual, and spiritual..."

memoirland.substack.com/p/the-memoir...
Great interview. It's always nice to get a peek at my work through an author's eyes: "[Mad Creek has] an amazing commitment to publishing creative nonfiction, with a focus on essays." @saribotton.bsky.social

Uh, catalog, not calendar

Becoming Educated: A Midwest Story An engaging and bold memoir about race, class, gender, and the meaning of education in the urban Midwest.

Becoming Educated (June): Simone Drake's memoir of attending #Columbus City Schools as an "integration guinea pig" in the 1980s and 90s. Funny, fascinating. ohiostatepress.org/books/titles... @colscityschools.bsky.social @colsunderground.bsky.social @matternews.bsky.social

The Afterlife of Sweetness: Poems Exuberant, searching poems that draw on Islamic, Hindu, Christian, and Greek traditions to reconcile holiness and rot, myth and memory, beauty and decay.

The Afterlife of Sweetness (February): "Bad immigrant daughter" poems haunted by lost lovers, Islamic theology, Hindu and Greek epics, and fractured selves, roving across strip malls and deserts of the American west. Winner of the Charles B. Wheeler Prize. ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

The Water Defenders: How Ordinary People Saved a Country from Corporate Greed The graphic adaptation of the acclaimed story of El Salvador’s grassroots environmental and human rights victory over a multinational mining corporation.

The Water Defenders (May): The graphic adaptation of a 2021 book detailing the true story of El Salvador's water defenders, who built a cross-national coalition to defeat a nefarious company's gold mine. Kids! Learn about human rights! ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

City of Toys: Essays A madcap and poignant exploration of motherhood, memory, and art that plumbs domestic life and cultural mythologies alike to examine the world we are building and destroying for our children.

City of Toys (March)--Lesley Jenike's madcap cultural criticism: motherhood, art, automatons, Brontës, and lots and lots about Cincinnati. "A universe built within every piece."—Hanif Abduraqib ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation Chronicles the author’s quest for orientation in the world: as an agnostic Jew, as a queer traveler and lover, and as a writer who can tell or twist the truth.

Place Envy: Essays in Search of Orientation (Feb)--Michael Lowenthal's first book of nonfiction--gay, Jewish travel essays about the search for belonging. ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays A memoir in essays that examines love, marriage, and identity in light of a spouse’s transition, asking what happens to us when the people we are closest to change.

Men I Hate: A Memoir in Essays (Feb)--"The surgical accomplishment of dissecting a life while enacting a delicate transition from rage and fear into empathy and understanding." —Claudia Rankine ohiostatepress.org/books/titles...

The Ohio State University Press: Spring 2026 Catalog The Spring 2026 catalog of the Ohio State University Press, with new titles in creative nonfiction, literary and cultural studies, rhetoric and communication, and more.

Check out the Ohio State University Press spring 2026 calendar! Memoir, essays, poetry, comics studies, sci fi studies, rhetoric, classics, narrative … email me at osup_publicity@osu.edu for exam & review copies. #academicsky #comicsstudies #teamrhetoric
bit.ly/3M0yBiJ_s

This is an incredible short piece.