Elizabeth Hazen Shares Her Tsundoku (Poetry books to Read)
In a new blog post, Elizabeth Hazen shares her tsundoku. Tsundoku is a Japanese word meaning "Acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one's home without reading them."
For Christmas, which seems like three lifetimes ago, my parents gave my husband a book of interesting words from around the world*. An engineer who has a soft spot for spoonerisms, puns, and wordplay in every form, he found instant delight in this book. Did you know that Germans have a word for the weight we gain from stress-eating? Kummerspeck. Or that the Scots have a word for that awkward pause when you’ve forgotten the name of the person you’re introducing? Tartle. Among my favorites are the whimsical Swedish smultronställe, a place of wild strawberries; the romantic Italian dormiveglia, the space between sleeping and waking; and the essential Japanese tsundoku, that pile of unread books on my bedside table that grows with each passing month.
Needless to say, I took that book of words from my husband, adding one more to my stack...
Rose Reads, Writing about Art and an UPDATE
On the 12th episode of Rose Reads, Rose Solari goes in-depth on writers writing about writing and art. She reads from her own novel which contains a good deal of beautiful prose about visual art, A Secret Woman, and the extraordinary short work of Richard Peabody as found in The Richard Peabody Reader.
New LFTRR Tackles the Question: Should We Write?
In this episode of Live from the Reading Room, James J. Patterson reads selections from Simone De Beauvoir’s “The Mandarins” and Richard Peabody’s “The Richard Peabody Reader” all in pursuit of the question: Should I write?
The Johns Hopkins Review Publishes two Poems by Elizabeth Hazen
Two poems from Elizabeth Hazen’s new collection Girls Like Us have been published in the spring edition of the esteemed Hopkins Review.