Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line.

Dear Spinster,

I had hoped that university would be my golden ticket to a golden world far away from the endless kitchen sink drama of my home-life. So really I was always bound for disappointment. Rather than dancing my way through a golden haze of new friends and old books, I have traded one set of insecurities and small sadnesses for another. I have watched my friends couple off, joke about another notch on their bedpost, and all while another night passes and my bed is empty. It did not worry me before. There was always so much time; months, years even. But now I feel I am creeping closer and closer to Miss Havisham levels of deluded loneliness, and that time is slipping through my fingers. 

I do not necessarily want a relationship, I merely wish to be attractive, to attract and occasionally fulfill the urges I feel as strongly as anyone else. I want sex. It should be easy. Perhaps it would be were I not as virginal as a Regency romance heroine. Only one man has ever deigned to kiss me and I was obviously horrible at it and no doubt the butt of many jokes the next morning. I do not wish to be merely a joke. 

A friend once told me that if I were an element I would be ice, and as much as I wanted to snap that ice wasn’t one of the four elements, I didn’t. It was true. I am as charming and kind as I can be, but I am so afraid of rejection that I can’t ever take my love life into my own hands. So I am cold. Frigid. But I want to melt. I spend my days poring over poetry and trying to find something meaningful in it. Perhaps poetry is a way to help me find something meaningful in myself and to find a way to share this with another.

Today, dear reader, I’d like to talk about stories and storytellers. When I was at university myself, I took a course on the history of writing and rhetoric. My delightful maddening professor lectured about European fairytales, how they were a shorthand parenting tool to teach young women about sexual threat and appropriate male protraction and other truish but oversimplified lessons.

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line. Previous installments can be found here.

A while ago I walked home from work and was not sure if I would kill myself when I got there. As I rounded the last block to my front door, my cellphone rang; a cousin I didn’t know well wanted to go out to dinner. We met in my driveway and went out to a restaurant that was not particularly good; I got home late, and then I went to bed and got up again the next day. I didn’t feel markedly different or better, but even I could recognize this as a moment of grace. 

How can I pursue and recognize these things, even in the depths of my depression? I don’t expect anything to make me feel better, or to fix me; but I want to know how to look for kindness when I do not know how to anticipate it or deserve it. Poetry seems like a safe place to start. 

Reader, your question is a challenge for me, both in the directness of its asking, and in the nuance it demands—not a poem in which to catalogue depression’s particular horrors, nor to seek platitudes for ordinary sadness—and I thank you for it. I wonder if today we might think about the depth of depression you describe as grief in the way it ebbs and surges, the way it disrupts, its recurring spectre of death. Grief demands attention, a painful and often grudging respect, but it is also not a place to dwell forever. You recognize this, and so let us ask the poets for their wisdom.

Before we do so, however, should you find yourself contemplating actual self-harm, let me direct you towards a variety of resources and hotlines in a variety of different locations. Okay? Then, on to the poetry.

Right from the title, Tina Chang’s poem “The Idea of Revelation” both demands change and consciously makes it abstract.

Please email all questions you would like poetry to answer via [email protected], with “Spinster’s Almanac” in the subject line.

Dear Spinster,

Every day this summer I have gotten up to read the news with a sense of powerless dread. Bombs in Gaza, the lack of regard toward Ferguson and all the other communities where people of colour are executed by American cops, more missing Aboriginal women in Canada, tanks on the Ukrainian border, all of it is overwhelming and horrible and I feel so useless. What do I do with these feelings? How do I be good in such a world?

Oh, fretful reader, I understand. The planet feels like it’s on fire and the best many people have managed is pouring out a bucket of water. It’s easy to let the bad things in the world pile up in your heart and feel them only as an overwhelming blur of dread. Some of them may feel unknowable and far away. Some may hit way too close to home. If you are overwhelmed and can’t find a path through, I have some thoughts, which come to you today via Jamaal May’s poem “Man Matching Description” from his recent collection Hum.