Carmen Giménez Smith

Cameron Awkward-Rich + Diana Arterian’s To-Read Piles (January)

Welcoming the new decade with the wonderful poet and scholar Cameron Awkward-Rich‘s book piles (yup, plural). Cam’s recently published poetry collection Dispatch won the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky Editor’s Choice Award at Persea. It’s not on my shelf yet, but I cannot wait to get my hands on a copy. His piles are amazing!

He explains: “I don’t maintain a ‘to-read pile’ per se, but here are the books that are not properly on the shelf, which means that they are just-read, to-return-to, to-finish, to-read, and/or to-hang-out-with.”

Pile #1, by the kitchen table, for the mornings:

Odes to Lithium, Shira Erlichman
Space Struck, Paige Lewis
The Malevolent Volume, Justin Phillip Reed
Felon, Reginald Dwayne Betts
The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching, David Gooblar
The Truth About Animals, Lucy Cooke
Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, Cathy Park Hong
Homie, Danez Smith
Leaves of Grass + Other Writings, Walt Whitman
The Odyssey, Homer (translated by Robert Fitzgerald)
Slingshot, Cyrée Jarelle Johnson
The Earthquake Room, Davey Davis
The World Doesn’t Require You, Rion Amilcar Scott
I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl’s Notes from the End of the World, Kai Cheng Thom

Pile #2, by my home office desk, (academic) books that I am currently writing with, or am likely to:

Black Madness :: Mad Blackness, Therí A. Pickens
Invisible Lives: The Erasure of Transsexual and Transgendered People, Viviane K. Namaste
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz
Black Queer Studies, E. Patrick Johnson + Mae G. Henderson (editors)
The Right to Maim, Jasbir Puar
Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love
Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley
Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, L. H. Stallings
We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, Ellis Martin + Zach Ozma (editors)
Ugly Feelings, Sianne Ngai
Histories of the Transgender Child, Jules Gill-Peterson
The Queer Limits of Black Memory, Matt Richardson
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton
Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality, Siobhan B. Somerville
Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom, Sarah Jane Cervenak
Light in the Dark Room: Photography and Loss, Jay Prosser
Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience, Hilary Malatino
How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless
Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History, Quinlan Miller
Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of Emotions, Kathleen Woodward
When Time Warps: The Lived Experience of Gender, Race, and Sexual Violence, Megan Burke
Transgressed: Intimate Partner Violence in Transgender Lives, Xavier L. Guadalupe-Diaz
On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf

Pile #3, under the TV, to be picked back up and/or put into rotation:

What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use, Sara Ahmed
Madness, Rack, and Honey, Mary Ruefle
Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement, Jian Neo Cheng
Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault
Ugly Differences: Queer Female Sexuality in the Underground, Yetta Howard
Useless Landscape or A Guidebook for Boys, D.A. Powell
Be Recorder, Carmen Giménez Smith
Presence Detection System, Nora Collen Fulton
The Dimension of the Present Moment, Miroslav Holub
Letters from Max, Max Ritvo and Sarah Ruhl
Like Trees, Walking, Ravi Howard
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud
Here Comes the Sun, Nicole Dennis-Benn

Here’s my own lone line. My hope for 2020 is to read more poetry—I’ve been leaning perhaps too far into prose this last year. But here’s where I’m starting out my next decade: