I love in depth answers to questions by people who deeply know the answer, anyway Courtney answered "why are so many historical romances set during the Regency??"
Loyola grad’s dad. BGSU dad. Poet. BGSU prof/director of creative writing. Proud union member. Co-founding editor @riverriverbooks.bsky.social. Auburn fan. Dodgers fan. I like board games & ttrpg. He/him. It's pronounced uh-MOR-ack. https://amorakhuey.com
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I love in depth answers to questions by people who deeply know the answer, anyway Courtney answered "why are so many historical romances set during the Regency??"
Natasha Sajé —
You know when you write poetry you find […] some glue for the heart Joanne Kyger
It’s gonna be gorgeous (it’s already gorgeous 🥰🙏💙 🌊 🌊) @riverriverbooks.bsky.social
Concerned that we are losing the necessary ratio. 15% of teachers/faculty should be irretrievably strange eccentrics. Every learning experience should have some element where in later life you can reflect with former classmates about how bizarre at least one (1) class per year was.
... lovely @maggiesmithpoet.bsky.social meditation on embracing accident in our writing: substack.com/@maggiesmith...
palfest This week's book of the week is WE HAD MANSIONS, a luminous and unflinching debut by queer Palestinian Appalachian poet and journalist Mandy Shunnarah, published last month by @diodeeditions.bsky.social. Get your copy of WE HAD MANSIONS from the good folks at Diode Editions.
We are planning on being at Punch Bucket Lit this year, y’all, and will be bringing some of these sweet posters with us, in case you’d like one 🌊 🌊📚💙
Assigning this book to my undergraduates again this semester!
Tiana Clark ♥️ from EQUILIBRIUM (Bull City Press) Day 16 - #SealeyChallenge @bullcitypress.com @sealeychallenge.bsky.social
Our Fall 2025 broadside have arrived, and they are SO PRETTY! 🥰🎉🎉 They feature the work of @egcunningham.bsky.social and Jameela F. Dallis, from Field Notes and Encounters for the Living and the Dead, respectively, both forthcoming next month! Preorder your bundle here: riverriverbooks.org/store/
Congratulations!!
I don't know how to untangle joy from all the rest. But here's a joy: my debut poetry book is coming out with Orison & it has a cover & I'm pretty sure my mom beat you all to pre-ordering it. But if you'd like a copy, that'd mean the world to me. Here's the link: www.orisonbooks.com/product-page...
Boiled down my AI policy this semester --
Delighted to reveal the cover for my forthcoming book from @jacklegpress.bsky.social with huge thanks to amazing editor @fulmerford.com
I am so excited to have a book coming out with @riverriverbooks.bsky.social !
We are so happy! The brilliance of the books in our catalog (including Scythe, obviously!) just floors us. We feel really fortunate to help these collections into the world.
Our summer 2025 Open Reading Period selections are here! These manuscripts absolutely astonished us—we can’t wait for you to read them. Coming to you in Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 🎉🎉🎉 @carolynroliver.bsky.social @mirandeb.bsky.social riverriverbooks.org/store/
Our newsletter is here! 🌊 🌊📚
Woke up super excited to share our press's news with y'all.
Something very very weird happened during the Hugos award ceremony... It's been on my mind for days, and so I wrote this blog: "When People Giggle at Your Name, or the 2025 Hugo Awards Incident" grigorylukin.com/2025/08/21/w... #Worldcon
Want to hear our good news first? Publication announcements? Reading period dates? Conferences we’re attending? Cool interviews? Sign up for our free newsletter here. We promise we don’t spam. Ain’t nobody got time for that: riverriverbooks.beehiiv.com
Shhh, don't tell @hanvanderhart.bsky.social I'm leaking this but @riverriverbooks.bsky.social has a big announcement coming tomorrow.
Checked the Worldcon site and there's an apology and retraction, and a new theme for the convention. www.lacon.org/2025/08/21/s...
Shoutout to #AWP26 for, in lieu of sending straightforward decline emails, allowing me to recreate the formative 10th-grade experience of standing outside the coach’s office scanning a sheet of paper for my name to see whether I’d made the varsity baseball team. (I hadn’t.)
Any rain big enough, anywhere, could sweep a house away. I need to reacquaint myself with the Earth I actually inhabit. —Jacqui Zeng, with our #SummerRiot poem today! ☔️🔥 @jacquiz.bsky.social
Sometimes I glimpse the future in the evenings. It appears like a doe on silencing moss, foraging among pocked leaves, drinking the last light in the pools. Chase Twichell
TODAY IS THE DAY!!!!!!! THE LAST SOUL ALMONG WOLVES is out!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!!!! I'm getting ready to jump on a plane for most of the day so it's a weird release day for me but AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH IT'S LOOSE IN THE WORLD AAAAAAAAAHHHHHH RUN!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🎉
This is in the replies and it demonstrates a real issue which is if you find profundity from an AI, you’re responding to something profound a human being wrote that was vacuumed up and what ends up happening is you thank AI and not only don’t thank the person, you have no idea they were involved
So @amorak.bsky.social shared this with me last week, and it makes me so happy to see projects with different reaches and purposes serving the same community 💜💜💜🙏🥹
“I wish / there were more libraries and less / violence, but I have always been so / painfully hopeful.” — Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Kayleb Rae Candrilli —
I just want to know where these ppl think ChatGPT got the em dash
People posting about how they’ve never seen em dashes used before the rise of ChatGPT are really great at telling folks they’ve never read a book before.
First - chill - then stupor - then the letting go
If you love someone's work, especially if you want them to make more, love it loudly! A few words can be small to you but life-changing for the author. Also: cross-share. Put your review on Goodreads AND Amazon. Mention it on social media. Request it in libraries.
Chloe Honum from The Lantern Room
Why be obedient to a world that will end? Fanny Howe
Grab issues 2 and 3 for just $15 each through 8/31! Pick up your copies today! www.postcardlit.com/store
“… at least since the time of Virgil, lyric poetry has not only contained its own critique but refused the moral glamor of the upper hand.” — James Longenbach
Chloe Honum 💙 from THE LANTERN ROOM (Tupelo Press) “The stars come out; / in what tense they shine, I’ve never been clear.” Day 8 - #SealeyChallenge @tupelopress.bsky.social @sealeychallenge.bsky.social
Joanne Kyger
“When a poem is not working, the case is often that changes in line breaks, wording, or syntax were never the problem to begin with. Rather it seems to be some more basic glitch in the poem's conception.” — Natasha Sajé
“Form is never more than a *revelation* of content.” — Denise Levertov
👏👏👏 Any manuscript we pick up could be a gem—so often, we discover a writer who is new-to-us. We read so carefully. And now, uh, we’ll be remembering some Instagram comments and user names 😳
I wish people realized how efficient editors can become when we get used to reading a lot of work over a lot of years -- that we are, perhaps, skilled! Especially when we're volunteering and have no good reason to just throw a bunch of MSes into the bin instead of reading them?
Day 6 of the #sealeychallenge August 6th- A Geography that Does Not Hurt Us, Carla Sofia Ferreira This collection from @riverriverbooks.bsky.social plays with form and poetic structure in such fascinating ways
❤️🙏
Be like River River
"... Under us asphalt melts, soup of burning tar & human regret. We are burning now. Driving. Burning. It’s too late." "American Highway," new poem in Sontag Mag: sontagmag.com/sontag-mag-v...
The 2025 Best of the Net Anthology is now live! Read work from this year's winners and see the full list of finalists here! bestofthenetanthology.com
Mine arrived this week - so excited to read it.
Dizzying, in a good way
The boys wear creased trousers and clip-on polyester ties they tear off when the bell rings at lunchtime. Then they wriggle on the blacktop like earthworms drying up. This $ deep cut is "Point of Stasis" by @jasutherland.bsky.social! poetrycurrency.com/poem/jennife...
"I mean I’m trying to talk about the body without talking about the state" Two new poems at Sontag Mag: sontagmag.com/sontag-mag-v...
The "your manuscript was one of our strongest" response went to approximately 10-12 percent of our submitters.
We give tiered responses to our submissions, and we respond to them all before announcing our selections. We don’t think it’s hard to be kind and thoughtful as a practice.
Seeing some cynical Instagram comments about “seriously doubt they read them all” re: 425 submissions and, ahem, not only did BOTH editors read them all, we ranked them 1-5, and wrote notes on them for each other, since we do this work long-distance and asynchronously. 🙏💙📚
My book of poems/heartache was a finalist, finally! What an honor. I can't wait to read about the poets that rose to the top. I've been tinkering at the ms all week, so I must have sensed an almost was coming <3 Thanks @hanvanderhart.bsky.social and @amorak.bsky.social. Y'all are the real deal!
Thank you for sending your beautiful collection to us! It will find a home soon. 🙏❤️
Summer 2025 Reading Period Report & Finalists newsletter is here! 🎉🎉🎉
A little secret is that you can’t know who buys (and doesn’t buy) your book because of your online presence. But being kind probably helps.
Day three: Extinction Level by @amorak.bsky.social
Authors will keep writing. If big publishing wants AI books, we will run our own presses and publish ourselves and each other. They want so desperately to outmode humans, but let's promise each other we won't give in.
Read Rebekah Wolman’s review of @rachelsedelman.bsky.social’s Dear Memphis in @psalteryandlyre.bsky.social here: psalteryandlyre.org/2025/07/25/b... Find your copy here: riverriverbooks.org/store/Dear-M...
“All flourishing is mutual.” Robin Wall Kimmerer
Amiri Baraka
the eternal question: did I successfully clean the dog pee from the corner of office or have I become noseblind to it
And another @amorak.bsky.social poem this week at @stonecirclereview.bsky.social! 💙🙏
"What else to say? It’s right here, love: gloaming sky where birds just were,..." I love this poem by @amorak.bsky.social in @stonecirclereview.bsky.social 💙💙💙
🙏❤️thank you!
Thank you! 🙏 ❤️
Another day, another love poem with geese.
Dictionnaire pittoresque d'histoire naturelle et des phénomènes de la nature, Guérin-Méneville, F.-E., 1838.
Half a wheel’s a rising sun: without spokes, an arch: half a loaf reveals the inner wheat: leavened transubstantiation. -Denise Levertov, from “Decipherings: for Guillevic”
William Stafford
Update on our manuscript reading:
“What I mean // is we should be kissing even now.” So pleased to have this new poem published in @moistpoetryjournal.bsky.social
Now THIS is what a poem about kisses looks like, feels like—leaves you out of breath, off balance, goofy-grinning, need-a-moment to recorporealize. Fucking hell, @amorak.bsky.social. What a way to start a weekend! 💋💙
🙏🙏🙏❤️❤️❤️
By a teacher who loves it -- teach it with passion and care. Show them how to find delight in language. Everything else will take care of itself.
“what is your dream job?” becoming someone who knows how to stay asleep for 8 hours every night
Dawn Lundy Martin —
“…faculty members will be able to click an icon that connects them with various AI features…, like a grading tool, a discussion-post summarizer… Canvas’s parent company, Instructure, is also in partnership w/ OpenAI… so instructors can use generative-AI technology as part of their assignments.”
More art can and should be sweaty, messy, and reflective of the weird, little freaks what created it. I’m saying this with my whole chest: sex, desire, thirst, yearning - and complicated versions of the above - represent aspects of or fullest selves.
“Just because the world is beautiful” A poem by Rebecca Lindenberg.
When I was a kid, I couldn't wait to be an adult because I imagined that adulthood would be a time when no one would interrupt me when I was trying to read. If I could go back in time, I would tell that little girl she has never been more wrong about anything in her life.
Amazing book!
More good news! Carolyn Oliver's THE ALCESTIS MACHINE is a finalist for the JULIE SUK AWARD for Best #Poetry Collection from Jacar Press! 🎉🎉🎉
Increasingly convinced the main damage cell phones have done to creativity isn't decreased attention spans or what not but the elimination of productive boredom. Inspiration comes from the mind filling the void inside. Hard to make art when you're constantly silencing the silence with "content."
“A source that cannot be verified or remain consistent is useless.” Shout this sentence from on high.
it is possible for a society to distribute quality education in an equitable, fair, and accessible way. it is not possible to distribute hierarchical elite power in a similar fashion, because that's not how elite power works.
"It’s not that traditional liberal learning is out of step with student demand. Instead, it’s out of step with the priorities, values and desires of a powerful board of trustees with no apparent commitment to liberal education" ... Yep. It's the trustees, almost always.
You don't want a photo of your fucking ugly child. Have this photo of an AI-looking plastic thing that's less realistic than some dolls.
Sweet jesus. LLMs will never make breakthroughs in *anything*, and it should be obvious why if you think about what they're trained to do: replicate and recombine existing data, maybe with some random noise, in a convincing-sounding way for whatever the user wants. They can't come up with new ideas.
Found this @jasonkoebler.bsky.social story about why AI isn’t a viable business model for journalism to be extremely well done and oddly hopeful www.404media.co/the-medias-p...
Not denying it!