[image by Brian]

Goal for June: Read a book a day. Follow my reading list here.

A blog isn’t all of a person’s life, of course
There is a vague, warm, tingly sensation and
the paintings on a leather that get hung on a wall

That comes from a poem titled “I Certainly Feel Useless At Times,” in The Anger Scale by Katie Degentesh — inspired in part by a psych test called the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, used as “the benchmark for determining people’s mental pathologies as well as their fitness for court trials and military service since the 1930s.”

Katie titled each poem after a question from said test, many of which are bizzarely hilarious, i.e. “When I am with people I am bothered by hearing very queer things.” To create the poems, Katie put in strings of phrases from the questions, then culled the text of her poems mostly from the search results.

Fittingly, The Anger Scale‘s cover resembles a bubble sheet for standardized tests, complete with a “yes” bubbled in next to the $12.00 retail price.

The Anger Scale‘s published by a small press called Combo Books, a part of part of Combo Arts and also publishers of the journal Combo, covered here.

Green reading tip: Support small presses.

So this tip isn’t particularly green, unless said small press is a green publisher. However, just as with supporting farmers’ markets, supporting small presses fosters communities of writers and readers around subgenres and topics worth preserving. Find a small press book you really like, and that small press will likely lead you to more bookish exploration and discovery.

It’s also just fun getting your books direct from a small publisher. I actually got The Anger Scale as a freebie when I subscribed to Combo the journal. Sort of like the literary equivalent of a baker’s dozen.

Finding you, my twin soul, has been the best thing for me.
However I am not sure I’d repeat the process next year.

Book read: Katie Degentesh, The Anger Scale

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