Greetings!  In 2012, I'm going to try to leave a note here more often.  By definition, this means the note will be short and (with luck) sweet!  You may find me waxing eloquent here in my typical (long-winded!) way from time to time, but mostly not.  Let's see how this works!

Winter break was not as much about pleasure reading as I'd have liked.  (Understatement.)  However, someone wonderful was lovely enough to give me Colson Whitehead's Zone One for Christmas, a novel I'd been dying to read since I heard him read from it at the Brooklyn Book Festival back in September.  I found a nook (the old, non-electric kind) in my parents' home, where I was visiting, and read the whole thing in about 24 not-entirely-consecutive hours.  Zombie apocaplyse for the literary speculative fiction fan.  LOVE.

I recently learned that Terrance Hayes published a chapbook, Who Are the Tribes?, with Pilot Press, so I had to get my hands on it.  (I have a soft spot for chapbooks.  I also bought the whole of Belladonna* Books' last season of chaplets and have them stacked and ready to read in the interstices of my life.)  Wow and wow!  Quirky, incisive, witty poems -- and a series of hand-drawn "portraits" to boot!  He's coming to read at Rutgers next month, and I will take advantage of the opportunity to get it signed.  Only 300 copies, folks, and I have # two-eighty-something . . .

So perhaps this should be "Two-and-a-Half Winter Reads," because I haven't finished this last one.  But still: an oldie that has been brought back into the playlists by a publisher with insight (which in this case could be described as hindsight combined with foresight).  William Carlos Williams' Spring and All has been out of print, as a collection, but it is available again, thanks to New Directions Press.  This is old news in the poetry world, but in case you've been sleeping, Rip Van Winkle, get thy copy now!  It will make you want to write something.

This is already no-longer-short.  I'm out.  Joyous new year to you all!

Peace.