Andrew Bertaina
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andrewbertaina.bsky.social
Andrew Bertaina
@andrewbertaina.bsky.social

The body is a temporary gathering place (2024 Autofocus) . One Person Away From You (2021 Moon City Press)3x notable at Best American Essays. Work in The Best American Poetry, The ThreePenny Review, Prairie Schooner etc.
“Because the light is not something you see, exactly. You don’t look at it, or breathe, you feel a pressure but you don’t look. It is like being in the same room as a man you love. Other people are in the room. He may be smoking a cigarette….A radiance is hitting your skin”

Anne Carson
November 21, 2025 at 6:56 PM
On photography and violence from The Point
November 21, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Read these books this year to impress everyone on the internet, but it didn’t work, and they said I needed to write reviews of them as well if I really wanted to prove myself to them 😭
November 20, 2025 at 6:39 PM
“For who could doubt that we live in a time which resembles theirs? That we are the Romans, heading for disaster. That the meltdown is already well underway? That we’re living in a world that can’t sustain itself for much longer.”

Solvej Balle TR Sophia Smith & Jennifer Russell
November 20, 2025 at 6:18 PM
Good kid. Lot of energy for life.
November 20, 2025 at 1:47 PM
Happy to get an acceptance from Tex and Kurt for a collaborative poem about Pee-Wee Herman :).
November 19, 2025 at 7:16 PM
Our last 804 lit salon of the year will be held at Solid State Books and will feature: Kevin Kearney, Nick Gardner, Sam Liming, Diana Rojas, Sam Ashworth, and Ned Russin.
November 19, 2025 at 5:48 PM
“My eyes catch the shine on the water…It spreads like a white glimmer on the surface all around me like the fragile skin of loneliness we try and try to shed. My arm reaching up into the air as I breathe, I break through the surface momentarily and then glide back beneath it.”

Kyoko Mori
November 19, 2025 at 1:45 PM
Childish excitement about continuing this book!

Volume III

On the calculation of volume by Solvej Balle
TR Barbara Haveland
November 18, 2025 at 8:25 PM
“I am learning to be passive, to receive each day without reaching for it. And the days wash over me like an ocean. I bathe in blue refractions, in phosphorescent pearl. At night I fall asleep listening to the Mediterranean…when I walk across rooms, I wade through shallows.”

Susan Mitchell
November 18, 2025 at 5:29 PM
Done!!
November 18, 2025 at 2:19 PM
November 17, 2025 at 10:06 PM
“Here everything is admissible—philosophy, ethics, divinity, criticism, poetry, humor, fun, mimicry, anecdotes, jokes, ventriloquism—all the breadth and versatility of the most liberal conversation..all are permitted and combined into one speech. “

Emerson on the essay
November 17, 2025 at 5:58 PM
Sleepy
November 17, 2025 at 1:50 PM
Annual trip to sugarloaf and a brewery with the whole crew
November 16, 2025 at 8:36 PM
November 16, 2025 at 5:20 PM
Morning
November 16, 2025 at 1:40 PM
November 15, 2025 at 10:04 PM
Shimmerings over the bread of The Milk Maid, over the side of the boats and bridge of the View of Delft like so many diatom-tiny florins and surveyors poured out of sunlight itself
The light from…the universe enters Vermeer’s open window—on the level of light, it must be like a needle threaded.
November 15, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Seamus Heaney
November 14, 2025 at 9:56 PM
And then, by a faint luminosity—now rising above the horizon of my memory despite all that rain—I could distinguish the outline of her face; but there was nothing and no one to fear, and presently she would gently exhale the breath she had held for a moment and her eyes…close[d]
November 14, 2025 at 5:51 PM
I am old but still fw this a lot
November 14, 2025 at 2:29 PM
November 13, 2025 at 9:57 PM
November 13, 2025 at 6:14 PM