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Anna Akhmatova, from The Akhmatova Journals, Vol. I: 1938-1941

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I don’t really have a best-of list for books, as other than uni stuff, my “read” shelf didn’t expand much.

However, I watched some interesting movies and shorts and stuff, so I figured I’d share some I enjoyed.

What movies & shorts do you recommend I watch in 2025?

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Artist: Miles Johnston.

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“Winged or wingless no joyful god visits me.”

— Selected Poems, ‘The Grey-Eyed King’ by Anna Akhmatova tr. Richard McKane

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instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds- disorderly, and marvelous and ours.

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things: What It Looks Like To Us and the Words We Use

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“I can’t sleep without your breathing and I can’t breathe each time you’re leaving.”

— Placebo - English Summer Rain

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I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search for them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?

—C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

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SOMETIMES WOMEN MUST SWALLOW DARKNESS IN ORDER TO GROW, TO CHANGE, TO DEFEND THEMSELVES. I AM THE DARKNESS.

Trista Mateer, Persephone Made Me Do It

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John Keats, from a letter to Fanny Brawne written c. July 1820, featured in Selected Letters

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What if the only face of desire I recognize is loss?

— Lara Mimosa Montes

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A universe that includes you cant be all bad, but does it? at this distance you’re a mirage,

Margaret Atwood, True Stories: Postcard

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We’re Harkonnens. So this is how we’ll survive. By being Harkonnens.

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Natalie Díaz, from “Wolf OR-7”, Postcolonial Love Poem

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It's true, he smudged oranges in Canoga Park and lived in a chicken coop, yes, oranges. Now, there are no oranges at all in the whole of San Fernando Valley, no oranges, just names of streets: Orange Boulevard, Orange County. They way we do. Naming what's no longer there.

Ada Limón, Bright Dead Things: A Trick Of The Light

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Lidia Yuknavitch, from Reading the Waves: A Memoir published in 2025