Jacqueline Woodson: "The ‘goodnight nobody’ always caught me by surprise and made me think ... I thought in including that ‘Goodnight nobody’ spread, Hurd and Brown were telling a quiet truth about emptiness and the world." - LitHub
Graham gives her readers the possibility of "adaptation and radical witness. Her language and poetic structure adapt to her changing world and reality, and never succumb to denial." - The Rumpus
Jane Campbell, author of the book Cat Brushing and experienced psychotherapist: "What I wanted to say, from quite an angry point of view, was, yes, old women are totally functioning human beings." - Slate
That's important for the planet: "There was this sense of wonder in everything, this sense of awe, not just beauty as some sort of painting you put on your wall, but as a feeling inside of you." - The Rumpus
"Smells, bells, blood, guts, spectacle, and of course, bodies, bodies, bodies. Catholicism is a deeply theatrical religion based in provocative stories." - The Millions
In past years it has proven so unpredictable that even one of its winners likened the literary award to “a chicken raffle”. Referring to an Australian custom of raffling poultry as a fundraising activity, the phrase suggests luck, rather than talent, is key to scooping the prize. - The Conversation
"After 12 years and 261 million euros (more than $256 million) of renovations, the country's national library in the heart of Paris has reopened and is showing off more than 900 of its treasures." - The New York Times
"The Palafoxiana Library ... owes its existence to one of Puebla's early Catholic bishops, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, who in 1646 donated his private library of 5,000 volumes to a local religious college — with the hope that anyone who knew how to read would have access to them." - AP
It turns out that Cecily Chaumpaigne, believed to have been the victim of Chaucer's alleged attack, was on the same side as Chaucer in the legal case at hand: they were both defendants in a lawsuit by Chaumpaigne's former employer, whom she left to work for Chaucer. - The New York Times
"Our current problem isn't an insufficient amount of Black representation in literature but a surfeit of it. And in many cases that means simply another marketing opportunity, a way to sell familiar images of Blackness to as broad an audience as possible." - The New York Times Magazine
If you asked a hundred contemporary poets working today to define what they meant by poetry you would find yourself orbiting a hundred differing, often conflicting definitions. - The Point
Not even great poets can live off their poetry — “The Waste Land” sold only about 330 copies in its first six months — so Eliot, from the mid-1920s on, worked as a director of a new publishing firm called Faber & Faber. - Washington Post
How refreshing it was to see the Booker prize take another turn last month – putting the short in shortlist, as it were – with a record-breakingly succinct nominee: Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is just 116 pages. The Spectator
"Rod McKuen sold millions of poetry books in the 1960s and 1970s. He was a regular on late-night TV. He released dozens of albums, wrote songs for Sinatra, and was nominated for two Oscars." (He was also an astounding liar.) How did he disappear from the culture so completely? - Slate
The bookshop, which opened in 2019, was in its infancy as a business when it was forced to close during Covid lockdowns. It managed to stay afloat, but Mrs Fridd feared the cost of living crisis could become "the straw that broke the camel's back". - BBC
