This one isn't giving me a lot of immediate ideas to go on, so I might just try to brute-force my way through some common words to see if they give me any hints.

I've been spending a little more time on Redactle than I'd like (I mean, it's fun, and I'm learning some stuff, and I enjoy watching how I think), so I might try to do this one a little more quickly.

I think this is the first poem of Sharif's I've read.

Her use of the word relief made me go look it up in a dictionary to learn all its meanings.

I can't remember the last time I read about tanners; it reminds me of learning about Butcher Town in San Francisco, a neighborhood and a time I've come across only rarely in reading about the history of the city.

The quick, almost abrupt ending is such a shift from the rest of the poem, that long history and then sudden (but also long, just compressed) change.

This one looks a little more challenging - I'm not immediately seeing a lot of patterns or phrases that suggest anything - except for "from the ██████ up" in the last sentence, which suggests ground or bottom.

Bottom has no hits; it's ground.

After discovering April Gornik at the Dayton Art Institute's site and beginning to explore her paintings last week, I was looking forward to spending time with more of her work.

Today I'm looking at Light Before Heat. The thumbnails for Gornik's large paintings from 1980-1987 show lots of darker images - which I love - but that meant my eye was drawn to the exceptions, like the lovely, light-filled (light-made?) Light Before Heat.

On a quick skim, I saw "Off-████████ " which sure makes me think "off-Broadway."

On a further skim, I note the very first sentence ends with "is an ████████ ███████. ", and that "is" suggests a living person. And that "an" needs to be followed by a vowel, which is making me think "American author."

I love this book. I'm wending my way through it, taking my time, taking time to appreciate Kimmerer's stories and images, her experiences and understanding.

One of the images that stays with me the most is her standing waist-deep in a river, for hours on end, recording the layers of mosses growing on the cliffs edging the river. I love reading about the specifics of her field work.

Right away this looks like something related math, what with the [█, █) and ~ ███(█).

I'm trying to spend a little less time on these, so let me try a few things right away:

So, the main thing we have to go on at first is punctuation. I notice the _._ in the bullet list about a quarter of the way through. There are similar _._______ blanks a few paragraphs later. That makes me think of numbers, so possibly a ratio or measurement.

"during," one of the free words, appears 28 times; that seems like a lot.

Then 1/3 of the way down, there's a bullet list with ~_ and _______ per ___, which again look like math and numbers.

So, my first wild guess is gravity, which is wrong but at least appears twice.

I discovered April Gornik at the Dayton Art Institute's site, and a quick web search turned up her own site.

What beautiful paintings.

I spent several minutes looking at Blue Day, Blue Night. The trees are nearly black, and the sky is a deep storm-suggestive blue, with ice floe clouds.

I was delighted to find this in one of my neighborhood free library boxes.

I could have sworn I first heard about it via the NPR Book Concierge (now known as Best Books), but I don't see it anywhere on the site, so I must be mistaken.

As someone who delights in lots of things and tries to make it a practice to notice the delightful, I am the perfect audience for this book.