Today, we read and love “River House” by Diana Whitney. This poem is from Diana's forthcoming October 2023 collection, DARK BEDS (June Road Press). 

Pre-order DARK BEDS here and anywhere you buy books: https://www.juneroadpress.com/bookstore

Leam more about the Read to Me podcast and your host, Becky Karush: www.readtomeliteraryarts.com

DARK BEDS, Diana's second collection, juxtaposes the conflicted emotions of motherhood and domesticity with the intoxicating promises of transgression. Fantasies fulfilled or imagined play out against the haunted backdrop of Vermont’s woods and fields, a landscape both harsh and magical, conjuring longing and grief, dissolution and repair. Here we see how time is reflected in our bodies, our children, our choices, and the natural world. Dark Beds is an anthem for the “sandwich generation”—tired adults caught between the demands of growing children and aging parents, yearning to reclaim desire and a sense of self. Sensual, elegant, and deeply resonant, these poems lay bare the dark beds of a marriage, a garden, a human life: the intimate places where truths are buried, exposed, and sown again in hope of renewal.

Diana Whitney writes across genres with a focus on feminism, motherhood, and sexuality. She is the editor of the bestselling anthology You Don’t Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves (2021), winner of the Claudia Lewis Award. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Kenyon Review, Glamour, Crab Orchard Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere. Her first book, Wanting It, won the Rubery Book Award in poetry. Diana has received numerous grants for her writing, including from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and the Vermont Arts Council, and is completing her MFA in poetry at New England College. A feminist activist in her hometown and beyond, she lives in Vermont with her family and works as an editor and writing coach.

https://www.diana-whitney.com/

https://www.juneroadpress.com/

On Read to Me, we practice the essential, joyous skill inside great writing — listening. We listen for what we love in the work, and then put words to why it's so, so good

Today, we read from Unfollow Your Passion: How to Create A Life That Matters to You by Terri Trespicio. We trace a smart, beaming circle from the beginning of a wedding video, back to the beginning of a wedding video. Along the way, we get a completely new understanding of beginnings, endings, and the concept of forever.

Plus, the surprising appearance of Men in Black.

On Read to Me, we practice the essential, joyous skill inside great writing — listening. We listen for what we love in the work, and then put words to why it's so, so good

Today, we revisit a 2019 episode on the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: Greetings to the Natural World, also called, in Mohawk, Ohénten Kariwatékwen: Words Before All Else.

This Address’s legacy is much bigger than the United States Thanksgiving tradition. People of the Haudenosaunee nations recite it before ceremonial and governmental meetings. Their civic life grows again and again from acknowledgment of the natural world, relationship to it, and gratitude for it.

Is it ok for a white reader, which is me, to recite and explore the Address? Yes. There is ample documentation that the Haudenosaunee nations offer it broadly to the world.

Thank you to the bevy of voices who helped me recite the Address in 2019. You remain magical.