Battery Park City Library
Dear humans of the Listening World,
My name is Sage and I’m a neuroqueer library worker, writing to you from Munsee Lenape territory - also known as Brooklyn - on an overcast, humid June day. With deep gratitude, I wanted to share that Battery Park City Library has been gifted a stunning collection of twelve Unrestricted Interest chapbooks to make a home here. Thank you, Chris, for responding so generously to my whim-of-a-note some months ago!
I first found the work of Unrestricted Interest through this poetry project reading a dear friend invited me to, which offered so many unknowable spaces, great tenderness and sources of deep listening. From there, I spent time with this constellation of poetry and their ways of being at a time when I was discovering my own autism and its varied contours. As I was reading these chapbooks, they each felt to me like invitations to understand the threads between languaging and being, knowing and unknowing, and the ways in which you & I can overlap and uplift each other in this process.
In the upstairs nook of the library, these chapbooks have big windows to look out across the trees and chairs beside them for people to sit and read. I hope their invitations reach out like branches or limbs or ears, and gesture to previously unimagined possibilities of being with and hearing each other.
Thank each of you for sharing your poetry with us: Amelia Bell, Mark & Max Eati, Lonnie Shaw, Kaiser Yahya, Selena Pointer, Tristin Golatt, Nicholas Sheehan, Sammy Austin, Aidan Activator, Saysha Pointer, and Khalil. Your words enliven my heart.
w/ oceanic gratitude,
Sage