Stone poems of Acadia, Bookforum's cover, changes at Mass Poetry

Last week I took a drive to Rhode Island with people who know about plants to visit a private garden. The experts gushed at the rare specimens, floating the Latin names, able to identify almost every flower, bush, and tree. The pollinator section was a labyrinth of abundance, a wild swaying array of texture and color, Queen Anne’s lace, salvia, butterflyweed, those big round purple alliums, I don’t know the names, but I was overwhelmed by the beauty, the exuberance, the color and texture in the high July light. One of the experts said, “some gardens have soul.” I hadn’t thought about it like that before and it is true. Here’s to what’s growing, and here’s the literary news.

Stone poems out of Acadia

In 2024, Portland, Maine-based poet Mike Bove was awarded a residency at Acadia National Park a part the National Park Service’s Artist-in-Residency program. His new chapbook, Stone Math (Bottlecap) is the result of his year wandering, observing, immersing himself in a place where sea presses against rock. He drops into a different time: “Before blood. Before love and wars,” a time of “fertile absence.” It’s stone time. Stone tells time, is time, “is an equation.” Bove, in a series of short poem-paragraphs, documents the rock, the glacial carve, all the “fleck and dazzle.” And occasionally the insertion of a breathing creature, a crow, ghosts, coyotes and their yips “sacred and spectral.” The forces at play are volcanic. It’s the primordial surge and roil, and the geologists have made peace with their insignificance in 400 million year spans. He describes what growls and swirls and accumulates, whether we’re there to see it or not, and the edges begin to blur. “We’re everywhere now,” he writes. Bove knows, “There’s no beauty without disorder.” In a brief glossary of geologic terms, he defines striations — “parallel scratches or lines”— which is maybe what poems are, too.

Celeste Dupuy-Spencer on the cover of Bookforum

The cover story of the summer issue of Bookforum is on the life and work of Celeste Dupuy-Spencer. Moira Donegan writes beautifully about Celeste, who ended her life in April, capturing her complexity, her suffering at witnessing suffering, her irresistible self, and the power of her paintings. Donegan’s words about Burning in the Eyes of the Maker, the book Celeste and I collaborated on, hold the deepest sort of praise: “She is a verbally virtuosic and intellectually serious writer whose work, like Dupuy-Spencer’s, is morally ambitious and frequently mythic in scale . . . Part biography of Dupuy-Spencer, part meditation on her work, and part guide to the painter’s oeuvre, Burning in the Eyes of the Maker traces Dupuy-Spencer’s evolving relationship to politics and myth. It is a deeply felt collaboration between MacLaughlin and the painter.” I’m so grateful for Donegan’s deep attention on the book and on Celeste. And she makes an observation about suicide which is still settling inside me. I hope you’ll read Donegan’s piece. I hope you’ll find a way to hold the book in your hands. You can order it here.

Mass Poetry receives Poetry Fund Grant (and loses its executive director)
The Academy of American Poets recently announced the recipients of the 2026 Poetry Fund grants, supporting nonprofit poetry organizations and presses “whose work helps poets and poetry reach readers and communities across the country.” Of the nineteen organizations that received support, only one was in New England. Mass Poetry will receive $5000. The organization announced in June that poet Daniel Brock Johnson is departing his role of executive director after eight years, during which time he revivified the Mass Poetry Festival, stewarded the place through the pandemic, and raised nearly a million dollars, among other triumphs. “In light of Daniel’s departure,” wrote Mass Poetry board chair Usman Hameedi, “the Mass Poetry Board is reviewing the organization’s strategy and hopes to commence a search for a new executive director within a few months.”

Books of note out this week

Liberation Summer: The Moment that Changed the Women’s Movement and the Future of American Politics by Micki McElya (Avid Reader).

I Made You Up Inside My Head by Marta Pérez-Carbonell, translated from Spanish by Rosalind Harvey (Riverhead).

The Breast: A Cultural and Political History by Anja Zimmerman, translated from German by Nicola Barfoot (Polity).

Booksellers’ best: Staff picks from New England independent bookstores
Shebati at Wellesley Books in Wellesley, Massachusetts, recommends An Optimism by Cameron Awkward-Rich (Persea): “I’m always on the look out for Awkward-Rich’s books which, regardless of genre, always rewire my mind. This one is full of gentle revelations and poems written in conversation with poets, community members, and activists. Of particular note is ‘Trans Study: Regarding Lucille’s Roaches,’ which is a new favorite, and ‘For the Record,’ which bookends the collection beautifully.”

I’m so grateful you’re here. Thank you. You’re helping keep the literary ecosystem healthy. If this work matters to you, if you appreciate what I’m up to, please help me keep it going with a paid subscription. With my gratitude always, and my warmth to you as summer deepens.