On the recovery of attention + new book recs
How 11 months without scrolling social media gave me my attention back.
October 22nd marked 11 months since I began my recovery from social media addiction. I could sing the praises of that metamorphosis on and on. Honing in on the effects on my time and attention alone, while I will still make values-aligned posts occasionally, abstinence from the doom scroll and like / view notifications has given hours and hours of my time back each day. Yes I was in a rabbit hole for years. Yes it was and is difficult to come out of it. But the loving arms, ropes, and ladders are here and available to bring us out.
Recovery has made it possible for me to hold down a full-time job managing two bookstores, and to finally direct my energy into the projects I’ve been wanting to prioritize for years. This October, I finished writing a new poetry manuscript that I’ve just started sending out to potential publishers, and I’ve had seven poems accepted for publication forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Bamboo Ridge Press, Paperbark Magazine, and The Rising Phoenix Review. After the year-long rejection streak I was on, these back-to-back acceptances were tremendously encouraging of all the time and hard work I’ve been putting into my creative practice.
The ways I have witnessed myself grow into my professional role has also been a really positive source of pride in my life, too. One of the perks of my job is the overflowing access to new books, and I have been devouring them gratefully in the knowledge that, before recovery, I could barely read a paragraph in a book, if at all, without picking up my phone and scrolling for the rest of the day. I would love to share three new titles with you, below; two that were released this month, and one that will be released in the early new year.
In Fariha Róisín’s newest poetry collection, Survival Takes A Wild Imagination (Andrews McMeel, October 2023), Róisín writes candidly about desire—revolutionary desire, sexual desire, the desire for familial affection—and the hunger for loving the body as a conduit of God and social change. Through Róisín’s unobstructed and somewhat mantra-like internal dialogue, her poems intimately return to the complex mother-daughter relationships that so often live in the contradictions of immigrant family life, and the necessity (and burden) of healing intergenerational trauma. Full of promises, there is an aliveness to these poems that is both jolting and like a balm, moving us towards an actualized, fulfilling love.
Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (Knopf, to be released in January 2024) is a brilliant waltz through dreams and time. The contemporary poet’s outstanding debut novel follows Cyrus Shams, who lost his mother when the United States Navy shot down an Iranian passenger aircraft in 1988, killing everyone on board. Between the bizarre impossibilities that accentuate our lives, in all its ridiculous cosmic happenstance, Akbar takes us through the terrors of war, intergenerational addiction, the monotony of work, the call of sobriety, and ultimately, queer love. Throughout, art and poetry become as integral as a limb, a means to find our bearings through excruciating circumstances, while never being quite enough. Akbar’s writing is hypnotic, suffused with humor—I was hooked from the beginning.
A stunning poetry anthology edited by Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis, Another Last Call (Sarabande Books, October 2023) takes us through the lives of those struggling with active addiction, who are recovering from addiction, and whose lives have been affected by loved ones’ addictions. The grief of these experiences is immeasurable—I am reminded that for so many of us, it is truly recovery or death, a living-death or actually. These poems are striking, honest, and sobering, and having stood in the heart of some of these intersections, I found resonance here.
Thank you for sharing. I am actively battling with this right now. Your words have come to me at pertinent times for years. I’m inspired by your dedication to living with intention
Beautiful share. So proud to be your mom!