The Chicago Tribune has a short piece on the poet Faraj Bayrakdar’s appearance at Hay this year, noting his imprisonment in Syria, and his observations on the present crisis. Well worth a read.

The Literateur has posted a review of Coronary; I just wish that half the things that it said were true.

The news has been circulating for a few days, but: Natasha Tretheway, a native of Gulfport and author of four wonderful books of poetry and nonfiction, has just been named United States Poet Laureate. What with Kristen Dupard’s recent championship at the Poetry Out Loud national competition, it’s been a good few weeks for poetry in Mississippi.

It’s with great pleasure that this announcement comes from the editors of Dark Mountain: that copies of the new anthology, due out in August just in time for the third Uncivilisation festival, are now available for pre-order. It’s a great honor to be included in the volume — one of the poems from my collection Ecotone is included — but an even greater honor to sit alongside such wonderful, and necessary, poets and writers as Gregory Norminton, Caspar Henderson, and Em Strang. At each of the previous Dark Mountain festivals, the volume has always proved to be a critical source for discussion and debate, not least for its capacity to offer a roadmap forward through our present age and circumstance. Every one of these books is handmade, as is their thought. In short: August cannot come soon enough.

If education, as Stefan Collini said last night in his Enlightenment Lecture at the University of Edinburgh, is “more or less like a pizza — with knowledge being delivered from point A to point B”, then I’m grateful to have placed an order for an extra-large. I’ve just taken up a position as a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and will be in residence in Edinburgh from now until the end of the summer. I’m looking forward to studying a wide range of topics, among them, the cultural history of the haar — the freezing fog so famous along the eastern coast of Scotland (and what greeted me as I left the flat this morning). And, of course, what the Scots have invented in order to combat its effects.