Project Bookshelf: Halsey Hyer

A watercolor drawing of two orange milk crates filled with books. There is a wooden board on top of the crates also shelving books, only filling half of the board with an ornate bookend. The names and titles appearing on the text are from top-right to bottom left: Lorde, de la Paz, Duhamel, Satir, Weir-Soley, The Shell Game, Morrison, Wade, Pendas, Barnett, Harvey, Fleischmann, Oliver, Gongaware, Rankine, Florida, Pennsylvania, Beatty, Burroughs, We Want It All, Wen, Sharif, de Lima, Wang, Sargeson, Lamb, Goldman, Moore. The artist's signature reads: MENDING BENDER

This is a dedication to everyone who has ever helped me move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books and move all of my books.

Here is a watercolor depiction of the bookshelf of my heart, featuring names of people and places who’ve helped me curate my own shelves as I explore the worlds of words.

A best friend once said something like this to me: You might as well be married if you mix books; undoing something like that is worse than legal divorce.

Between my partner and I, our home is host to over a thousand books, sprawling on makeshift milk crate shelves with boards I’ve hoarded for projects I haven’t thought up yet. Yes, our books are all mixed up. Not only are they mixed up, they aren’t even organized, ha!

I’ve heard a rumor that a thousand books make a library, and five hundred makes the essence of a library. I’ve never been happier to co-create an intimacy founded on curation, collection, sharing, and trust.

Our shelves hold many, though here are the top hits: Audre Lorde, Marcus Rediker, T. Fleischmann, Jackie Wang, Ursula K. Le Guin, David Graeber, Philip K Dick, Kim Phillips-Fein, Virginia Satir, Lucas de Lima, Claudia Rankine, Augusten Burroughs, and—since fourteen, I’ve moved over twenty times. I lost almost everything twice. I retained a few things: my instruments, my books. This is one way of saying I haven’t always had a library. I’ve clung to books ever since I knew they were a tool into worlds otherwise unknown.

Another way of saying is I have always had my copy of Alan Moore’s Watchmen—speculative science fiction depicting a world where the U.S. won the war in Vietnam and Nixon remains in office. Vigilantism becomes necessary because the government has, in an unsurprising succession of events, failed the public through the murder of The Comedian, a government-sponsored superhero.

I read Watchmen on the clock at the job whose paycheck I used to buy the book in the first place. I worked alone in a sizeable red-and-white department store, and we’d be dead for hours. No one would come to check on me. They’d ping me on the walkie, and I’d feign how dirty the soda machine hookups were as my fingers stuck to the pages of Alan Moore.

I decided to begin collecting books seven years ago because Toi Derricotte’s The Undertaker’s Daughter and Aaron Smith’s Blue On Blue Ground grabbed me by the shirt and demanded that I have a reason to live and that reason’s name was poetry.

I forget often that my fingers stick to the pages of a book when everything else slips through them.

A white non-binary person with short spiked brown hair is mid-sentence holding a microphone, arms and legs crossed. They have tattoos on their arms and legs, piercings on their face, many rings on their fingers, and a watch on their right wrist. They’re wearing black lipstick and a black and floral party dress with bedazzled fishnets. They are sitting on an orange barstool with their arms and legs crossed holding a microphone in mid-sentence. There is one empty orange barstool to their right and one to their left. There is a large wall of books behind them and a door to the right of the frame.

Halsey Hyer (they/them) is the author forthcoming full-length hybrid collection, Divorce Garter (Main Street Rag, 2024). Their microchapbook of micropoems, Everything Becomes Bananas (Rinky Dink Press, 2022), was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023, and their debut chapbook, [deadname] (Anhinga Press, 2022), won the 2022 Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. Based in Pittsburgh, PA they’re a collective member of The Big Idea Bookstore and the 2022-2024 Margaret L. Whitford Fellow in Chatham University’s MFA in Creative Writing. Find out more on their website—www.halseyhyer.org.