I've been reading a lot of Camilla Grudova over the past month or so. I first discovered her through her short story The Custard Factory, which was in The White Review. This was quite a few years ago now. The Custard Factory was, I think, the first short story that made me realise that short stories can do what I love, love, love when poems do, which is start at one point and then go to something completely different, without worrying about things we might typically worry about in a narrative: circling back round, comfortable progression between one idea and the other, investment in a central character, etc. It's the lack of cohesion that makes it interesting, to me at least; a weird swoop, like missing a step, and then these two (or more) discrete objects that you can hold up and compare. (My favourite example of this in poetry is Mary Reufle's Blood Soup.)
Anyway, I immediately bought and read her first collection (The Doll's Alphabet) and loved it. As I said, that was a few years ago. I'm not sure what put me in the mood to binge her work now, although it is very much the literature of anhedonia (this great cavalcade of both remarkable and mundane things all described in the same flat affect) so it might have something to do with the period of depression I'm in right now.
I've just finished her second collection, The Coiled Serpent, and her novel, Children of Paradise. Her work has a comfy repetitiveness to it, even when the individual plots take these big swerves; it all seems to take place in the same labyrinth of pseudo-dystopian pseudo-period Britain, filled with variations on the same objects: antiques, old newspapers, nightgowns, etc.
This 'assemblage' approach has always been very appealing to me. I love lists of objects. I don't really need a plot if the list of objects is good enough. Lists of foods are especially good. Everyone makes fun of Haruki Murakami for listing every time his protagonists make spaghetti for lunch but I think it's awesome. Children's fantasy authors like C. S. Lewis understood this as well; The Silver Chair doesn't end with its big dramatic Dante-esque plot, it ends with this list of everything they eat while ice-skating with the talking woodland creatures. Very formative stuff... list poems are also so good, so satisfying. Read Butter by Elizabeth Alexander and feel joy.
Joy-lists are a bit different from what Grudova is doing, though. All her objects are covered with mould or broken. I find her work very reassuring, because it's a lot of things that I worry that my own work is -- monotone, extremely twee, structurally repetitive -- but I really love it, possibly not even despite those things. Turns out good things are good!
I barely ever read new literature but I made an exception for Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. It moved me deeply!
I had the funny experience of relating to the main character to an almost painful extent -- I'm not sure I've read any book that so accurately captures the mundane despair of going through every human interaction knowing you are doing it Wrong, somehow -- and then going on Goodreads.com and reddit and all of the negative reviews were talking about how completely unrelatable, and therefore unlikeable, the main character was. LOL, as they say!
I'm not sexually or romantically attracted to aeroplanes myself, but it's one of the paraphilias I appreciate the most. I don't think anyone could deny that the sleek, rounded chubbiness of commercial jets is very attractive. I also like the contrast of the bland white corporate cleanliness with 'perverse' sexuality -- perversion and non-pervision sitting next to each other in a way that creates an uncanny valley of appropriateness. Liminal, even!! The other aeroplane-related media that gives me this feeling is Outside Wolves' Farside-esque strips featuring aeromorphs, like this one.
My local wildlife has been very wonderful this spring/summer. The boundary of my garden is a river and beavers live there! I had never seen a beaver in real life before, and I've gotten wonderful views of them sitting on the bank cleaning themselves and beavering away at a tree and play-fighting and sailing down the river carrying sticks. I'm a bit of a creepy fan towards the beavers; I can hear splashes in the river from my bedroom so every time I do I go down to the bottom of the garden quickly to see if I can spot them. Sometimes I do, sometimes the splash was probably one of the trout that live there, that I also love; I like how they roll over in the water. There are lots of poems and things about how they flash silver when they do that and it's true.
More wildlife: grey wagtails, which I have either never seen before or never noticed. When they land on rocks in the river they bounce a little bit, as if they're steadying themselves. Bats visit the garden every evening, but always feel rare and special. Paying attention to wildlife is nice because it means you appreciate things that you might otherwise not. I don't really like midges or flies, in a very primal mammalian way, but when I look at them hovering over the garden I think, it's so good that they're here because otherwise the bats wouldn't be. Typing that out just now, that seems like a very cruel thing to say. Poor flies! It's how I feel, though, and I don't think I should lie about my cruel thoughts.