as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

*

Mahmoud Darwish, from Journal of an Ordinary Grief (tr. from the Arabic by Ibrahim Muhawi)

against forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness,

postwar polish poetry (edited by czesław miłosz!),

poems for the millennium: the university of california book of modern & postmodern poetry vol 1 + vol 2,

essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud,

poems that make grown women cry + poems that make grown men cry,

the oxford book of short poems,

a book of women poets from antiquity to now,

first loves: poets introduce the essential poems that capitivated and inspired them (so many literary greats!),

the poets’ grimm: 20th century poems from grimm fairy tales,

disenchantments: an anthology of modern fairy tale poetry,

arthur, the greatest king: an anthology of modern arthurian poems,

chapters into verse: poetry in english inspired by the bible,

killer verse: poems of murder and mayhem,

poetry in medicine: an anthology of poems about doctors, patients, illness, and healing,

a mind apart: poems of melancholy, madness, and addiction,

friendship poems + marriage poems + motherhood poems + fatherhood poems,

billy collins’ poetry 180 + 180 more,

good poems + good poems for hard times