All Saints & All Souls
Plus info on this month's What The Universe Is reading and a capsule review of the new Cure album.
A couple of years ago, after I had given a reading, a woman came up to me and asked me if I’d been raised Catholic. I admitted I was, and asked her how she’d figured it out. She smiled and said “It’s all over your poems.”
I haven’t been a practicing Catholic in about 30 years, and even when I did practice, it hardly made perfect, but my inculcation in the faith during my formative years made a lasting impression.
It is in part because of that enculturation that November 1 will always be All Saints’ Day for me, and November 2 will always be All Souls’ Day. I spent last night with some friends for Hallowe’en, and as the clock shifted past midnight, we found ourselves talking about the dead. Well, I found myself talking about a departed friend of mine, because that’s what happens when you bring a poet to a party, but one of my friends pointed out that it was perhaps the most appropriate moment to remember those who’d gone before us. I hope that you’ll take a moment between today and tomorrow to remember your own beloved dead, whoever they may be.
With the arrival of a new month, I also want to let you know a little bit about who will be reading for What The Universe Is: A (Virtual) Reading series for November:
November’s installment is a celebration of the world I’m thankful for — a world in which incredibly smart, warm, and generous poets write books and share their work with that world. I hope you’ll come through and help constitute an appreciative audience for our poets.
E. Hughes is the author of the poetry collection Ankle-Deep in Pacific Water (Haymarket Books 2024). They received their MFA in poetry and MA in English Literature from the Litowitz Creative Writing Program at Northwestern University. Their poems have been published or are forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Indiana Review, Gulf Coast Magazine, Colorado Review, and The Rumpus—among others. They are a Cave Canem fellow and were a semifinalist in the 2022 and 2023 92Y Discovery Contest, and longlisted for the 2021 Granum Fellowship Prize. Currently, Hughes is a PhD student in Philosophy at Emory University.
Suzanne Frischkorn is a Cuban American poet and essayist. She is the author of four poetry books, most recently Whipsaw (Anhinga Press, 2024), and Fixed Star (JackLeg Press, 2022), as well as five chapbooks. She’s the recipient of The Writer’s Center Emerging Writers Fellowship for her book, Lit Windowpane, the Aldrich Poetry Award for her chapbook Spring Tide, selected by Mary Oliver, and a Connecticut Individual Artist Fellowship. Her poems have recently appeared in Denver Quarterly, North American Review, Salamander, South Dakota Review, and Latino Poetry: A Library of America Anthology. She is an editor at $–Poetry is Currency, and an assistant poetry editor for Terrain.org.
Registration is easy and quick at bit.ly/WTUINov2024.
In other news that may or may not be of interest, I’ve been really enjoying Songs of a Lost World, which is the first new album by the Cure in 16 years. I described it to a friend and fellow Gen X music enthusiast as being “in the dark-brooding-Robert-in-the-rain mode, but it feels so right,” and it’s nice to hear such a prominent voice from my personal soundtrack singing about the end times during what feels all too often like the end times.