Bookin' It in 2022

I finished 20 books in 2022.  The titles in bold were particularly influential, inspiring or intriguing.

1. Cack-Handed: A Memoir by Gina Yashere 
2. Can Black People Grow Hair? by Andrea Krystal 
3.  Call Us What We Carry: Poems by Amanda Gorman
4. Rainbow Warrior: My Life in Color by Gilbert Baker
5. Beyond the Gender Binary by Alok Vaid-Menon
6. High School by Sara Quin & Tegan Quin
7. Femme in Public by ALOK
8. Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving Extremism by Megan Phelps-Roper
9. Unprotected: A Memoir by Billy Porter
10. Your Wound / My Garden by ALOK
11. If You Give a Pig the White House by Faye Kanouse
12. Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity Edited by Micah Rajunov and Scott Duane
13. Joan Jett & The Blackhearts 40x40: Bad Reputation / I Love Rock-n-Roll
14. Long Time Coming: Reckoning with Race in America by Michael Eric Dyson
15. Bearing My Seoul by Taryn Blake
16. The Little Book of Pride: Love Is Love by Joanna Gray
17. Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family by Amanda Jetté Knox
18. Enter the Blue by Dave Chisholm
19. Wolfpack: How to Come Together, Unleash Our Power, and Change the Game by Abby Wambach
20. Saint Peter and the Goldfinch: Poems by Jack Ridl

Quote of the Day

The work of the poet is often the same work of democracy building.  It's to equalize, it's to connect, to engage, never to oppress.

 -- Amanda Gorman

Quote of the Day

We've learned that quiet isn't always peace,

And the norms and notions of what "just is"

                                    Isn't always justice.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 206

Quote of the Day

But to be disturbed is to be moved,

Pushed toward progress.

Our disgust is a measurement

Of distance, a distaste for what was.

It is to grasp that we must never go back.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 150

Quote of the Day

Fundamentally, supremacism means doing anything to keep one's sole conceit, Even if it means losing one's soul.  It means not wearing the mask that would save you, for that would mean taking off one's privilege.  It means, always, choosing poisonous Pride over Preservation, Pride over Nation, Pride over Anyone or anything.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 146

Quote of the Day

To be kept to the edges of existence is the inheritance of the marginalized.  Non-being, i.e., distance from society -- social distance -- is the very heritage of the oppressed.  Which means to the oppressor, social distance is humiliation.  It is to be something less than free, or worse, someone less-than-white.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 145

Quote of the Day

Why it's so perturbing for privileged groups to follow restrictions of place & personhood.  Doing so means for once wearing the chains their power has shackled on the rest of us.  It is to surrender the one difference that kept them separate & thus superior.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 144

Quote of the Day

Grief, like glass, can be both a mirror & a window, enabling us to look both in & out, then & now & how.  In other words, we become a window pain.  Only somewhere in loss do we find the grace to gaze up & out of ourselves.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 140

Quote of the Day

Storytelling is the way that unarticulated memory becomes art, becomes artifact, becomes fact, becomes felt again, becomes free.  Empires have been raised & razed on much less.  There is nothing so agonizing, or so dangerous, as memory unexpressed, unexplored, unexplained & unexploded.  Grief is the grenade that always goes off.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 78

Quote of the Day

Trauma is like a season, deep & dependable, a force we board our windows against.  Even when it passes, it will wail its wild way back to our porch.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 75

Quote of the Day

... there is no better compass than compassion.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 48

Quote of the Day

Our wounds, too, are our windows.  Through them we watch the world.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 43

Quote of the Day

We were told never to use I when writing, because eliminating this voice makes arguments legitimate.  But we realize there is nothing that convinces like the self does -- our life, our body & its beating, proving its own jagged point.  Tell us what is more powerful than the unerased.

-- Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry, p. 32