Lady love.

I am heartbreak-prone. I've always been this way: as a child, my family called me Sarah Bernhardt, and no amount of nosing through family albums or slyly questioning older, adoring relatives will prove the nickname wasn't wholly deserved. I was known to feel on an elephantine scale, to want with an urgency that worried my mother sleepless. My laughter pealed uncontained; my sobs came from the deep well of my diaphragm. I swooned often.

While I've learned to withhold the outward appearance of my extreme emotional capacity, not much has changed in my interior life: I feel to a degree that most people I know find baffling, if not entirely worrisome. It's not that it's terrible, just terribly large, like an oversized retriever's bruise-inducing tail thumping against your leg, his enthusiastic greeting that covers you in scratch-marks and drool. I find that often I have to cry, to find that release weekly or else this huge thing might come bursting forth in rage, in a manic gale of inappropriate laughter. This is probably the reason I write poetry, and such grotesquely visceral poetry at that.

This week I've found a release in Nina Simone, specifically this song:

Each and every time I listen to it, even on repeat in my car, I find my chest welling. It's like magic.

Similarly is Mark Doty's poem, Faith, which catches in my throat halfway through each reading, even if I'd just finished reading it moments before. Much of this immediacy comes undoubtedly from the overlap in the subject material and my current body of work: writing about my father's death from AIDS causes many obstacles about specifics, how to remain truthful without becoming artless. "a vacant four-letter cipher" is just outright enough without becoming the fist on the table slam of writing "AIDS." It's a quiet motion-- a palm spreading menacingly on the table toward you. One day I hope I can be so restrained.

The thing about feeling so moved from Nina Simone this week is that I am often distressed to note that most of the art that moves me comes from men: Caravaggio and Balthus; Sam Cooke and Rufus Wainwright; Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Charlie Smith. Not to say there are no women on my list, just that they feel harder to immediately recall. Some women come to mind immediately, however: Artemesia Gentileschi tops the list just for her Judith Slaying Holofernes, which is by far the best version, trumping even Caravaggio's. And I can barely get through a book by Natasha Trethwey or Lucie Brock-Broido without rushing to my computer to jot something down. But by and large, it's the men who've gripped me first and for the longest: I remember long Sunday mornings listening to Frank Sinatra with my father, leafing through Antoine de Saint-Exupery's The Little Prince and eating toast; at night we'd have shrimp and watch Fred Astaire movies until sunrise. The first painting I ever studied was the copy of Matisse's Woman in a Purple Coat that hung over my father's bed, and my gateway poet was E.E. Cummings ("somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond").

After this mini-revelation while tearfully listening to Nina Simone's "How Long Must I Wander" for the hundredth time this week, I decided to focus on women artists as much as I could. Here is what I've been listening to, looking at, and reading:

Edith Piaf (Autumn Leaves), Adele (I Found A Boy), Melody Gardot (Worrisome Heart), Ingrid Michaelson (You and I).

Jenny Saville, Loretta Lux, Amy Cutler are my general female artist go-tos.

Amy Cutler

It's honestly probably time for me to really do some lady-artist hunting.

Amy Hempel's Collected Stories has been my groggy-morning reading when I can't seem to get past putting on a sports bra and thinking about the gym. Her stories are just short enough and weird enough for my brain to turn itself on. Claudia Emerson's Figure Studies is serving as a kind of lighthouse for the series about girls' camp and school I'm working on, and Zadie Smith's On Beauty is my leisurely re-read novel for summer. Also, when I'm feeling wanderlusty (which, who are we kidding, I always, always am), Jan Morris' The World is Just. Amazing.

My dearest pleasure lately has been Sophie Dahl's cookbook, which is lovely and sweet, peppered with personal essays from a food enthusiast who seems, well, like someone I would be friends with. The recipes are very personal, with introductions like "My beloved is a musician, so I make this for him." They are divided by meal and by season, and they give me enormous, fluffy ideas about creaking wooden tables with whole afternoons spent lounging with friends over roasted beet salad and coconut curried shrimp, lemon sorbet Prosecco served in colored glass goblets with fistfuls of fresh-cut peonies sitting in a teapot-cum-flower vase.

Peasant Soup, made with broccoli and cauliflower instead of kale and celery.

Also, imagine my delight when a recent google search unearthed Sophi Dahl's cooking show on youtube! Ah, how my life would change if I could have the BBC-- I might actually buy a television. I love the music, as though her show has some romantic plot. She is just adorable. (As an aside, I love, love, love that she stands at 6 ft over her 5'4" husband without any embarrassment or self-consciousness whatsoever... while I'm the more elf-like one in these situations, I do have a soft place in my heart for couples of extreme heights, as I tend to go for some tall drinks of water myself.)

There is nothing that I love more than sharing good food with lounging friends, laying about for hours on end. I'll have to make more of a priority of it this summer, especially when Miss Dahl includes this rhubarb mess thing that I absolutely must try or else I just might faint.