Catharsis is everything

We’re past the Solstice

and the light has already shifted. Even in midsummer I feel a subtle sense of loss, the end of poppies and peonies, the gardens’ sweet, irrepressible unfolding, those heady long days cresting towards the zenith.

Every year I want to slow it down, savor it.

This year the season rushed past like sudden wind behind a hawk’s wings. I felt it on my face but couldn’t revel. I mustered my strength for my mother’s memorial, wrote the 1000 words I would speak about her, arranged bouquets of farm flowers in mason jars as thunderheads gathered before the ceremony, supported by my oldest friends and beloved partner.

I didn’t know if I could stand up in front of dozens of people and read a letter to my mother, if I could stay composed in the tense silence of family estrangement. Somehow I did. I spoke about her legacy of strength and resilience, the near-murder she survived and testified about decades later in an act of tremendous courage and feminist witness.

We all felt her presence in the air. It was cathartic to sob, remember, love and grieve in community.

Etymology of catharsis: to purify, to cleanse.

Mother-love and an epic 80s vest on my 12th birthday

Something cracked open in me

after the memorial and now I find myself crying everywhere. After so long with tears tamped down by antidepressants, it’s a gift to feel this release.

• I cried watching the track and field Olympic trials when trans/nonbinary runner Nikki Hiltz blazed to an extraordinary finish in the 1500m, setting a meet record. I can’t wait to watch them race in Paris! 🔥

• I cried in the car hearing the SCOTUS immunity ruling that makes the president “a king above the law”, then cried again reading people’s responses of fear and vulnerability, the terror of an autocratic Christian state (“I’m getting a passport for my trans child,” wrote one parent).

• I cried listening to Miranda July read her astonishing new novel All Fours, when the unnamed narrator finally shares her experience of birth trauma with another mother.

Is it grief or menopause, or a raw combination of everything all at once?

Dark Beds got Swifted!

What a thrill to see Dark Beds paired with its very own Taylor. I love the energy, the emotion, the lowered dark lashes, and especially the mycelial lattice of her top mirroring the cover detail.

Some folks on FB thought this meant Taylor herself had selected and shared my book, but really it was the brilliant creation of memoirist Amy Lorraine Long who runs the Instagram account @taylorswift_as_books (go check out her other fabulous cover matches).

The Dark Beds audiobook is here

I recorded it this spring with my laptop and a small mic in my daughter’s closet while she was away at college. In the womb-like space without a lightbulb, I pushed aside the multitudes of clothing, sat crossed-legged on a pillow, and took small sips of warm water in between reading my poems out loud.

It was cozy and strangely satisfying.

The audiobook was produced in-house at June Road Press and it’s available HERE for only $9. You can listen while you take a walk, drive, do the dishes…

Thank you as always for supporting small press publishing!

Poetry Event Roundup

• I read with wonderful women poets at the Hartland Poetry Festival in April, including my friend/former professor Ivy Schweitzer, an Emily Dickinson scholar and badass feminist whose first solo poetry collection is coming in 2025. The festival was filmed by Junction Arts and Media and you can watch it HERE.

  (You’ll find me reading at 52:31 and sharing my writing process during the Q & A at 1:10:50)

• My winter conversation with James Crews about poetry, grief, healing, mental health, and self-forgiveness is now available for all to watch. I loved visiting James’ poetry community The Monthly Pause—a heart-opening experience.

• Summer in the city! I’m reading at Brookline Booksmith on July 18 with some of my poetry heroes—Stephanie Burt and Anna V. Q. Ross. This event will be live-streamed and you can register for free HERE. Or if you’re in the Boston area, come join us.

Necessary Reads

• What Fresh Hell is This by Heather Corinna. Hilarious, knowledgeable, feminist, and fully revolutionary reading for those in peri/menopause– and the people who love them. Written by acclaimed queer sex educator and founder of Scarleteen, this book is sustaining me and informing me during this time of hormonal chaos. Who knew that women report better mental health post-menopause than at any other time since childhood?

• The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin. I devoured this sweeping family novel in a few days, rivetted by the story of 4 Jewish siblings who sneak out to see a fortune-teller in the summer of 1969 on New York’s Lower East Side. She predicts the dates of each of their deaths, and what follows is an epic journey of fate and free will, love and ambition, magic and meaning-making that moves to San Francisco during the AIDS epidemic, Las Vegas in the 80s, all the way to the present day.

• All Fours by Miranda July. The summer’s hot literary bestseller is juicier and weirder than you can imagine. I read it over an intense weekend in the Northeast Kingdom, finished it triumphantly (weeping), and immediately got the audiobook so I could start again and savor July reading it in her own irresistible voice. Dubbed “the first great perimenopause novel” by the New York Times, All Fours traverses marriage, freedom, desire, obsession, friendship, art, creativity, intimacy, how to exist as a 21st century married mother when you have “a journeying soul”… I’ll be featuring it in an upcoming review for Electric Literature.

What’s on your summer reading list? Do you have any favorite peri/menopause novels or menopause-adjacent books to recommend for my next project? Reach out and let me know.

Thanks for getting into Girl Trouble with me. Stay cool and give yourself permission to laze about and daydream.

xo Diana

P.S. I’m obsessed again with Sinéad O’Connor’s epic song “Troy” and how it transforms W.B. Yeats’ “No Second Troy”. Who else has reimagined a classic poem so powerfully?

P.P.S. Sha’Carri Richardson gets it done🔥

P.P.P.S. Can’t stop watching the cast of Bridgerton getting down