Last Wednesday, my wife and I went to see the newest Harry Potter movie, The Half-Blood Prince. As someone who had never read a Harry Potter book yet still enjoyed the previous movies well enough, I was happily willing to go but not especially eager nor overjoyed with anticipation the way my wife and the majority of the audience seemed to be.

As it turned out, the movie was great fun: full of action and drama and mystery and cool special effects. In fact, by the time the end credits rolled I had completely succumbed to its spell: I wanted (no – needed!) to know what would happen next and how things would be resolved.

My wife refused to give me answers: “Guess you’ll have to read the final book for yourself or else wait until the next movie comes out.” Frustrated, I called my brother for answers and he said basically the same thing: “You should read the final book. It’s a quick read.”

For me, a quick read is never a quick read. Unlike my brother and my wife, I tend to read very slowly. So when I picked up the seventh Harry Potter book, The Deathly Hallows, and held the nearly-800 page tome in my hands, I had the distinct feeling that I would be dedicating the rest of my summer to completing it.

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Those who suffer from random ballads, unrequited ampersand love, sleepwalking in the Donut factory, the need to starve all rabbits to death because you love them like that, a strange anxiety that you are the only one in the world who can’t tell carob apart from chocolate, supplication, irresponsibility, petty secrecy, a reflex by which you clutch epically at whatever night will have you, a bunch of good ideas that you prevent yourself from undertaking because you spend too much time doing laundry, pointed coughs, a whole credit card for the purchase of sunglasses, pony love, pool love, pockmark love, and/or if you are really a spear, a blizzard, or a downfall, and you’ve been faking it through hopskotch and teller interaction this whole time, you will want to click and sink into notnostrums* 3, the new issue of online poetry edited by Guy Petit and Luke Bloomfield. Be sure to gawk the trailer for notnostrums’ upcoming poetry movie If You Think Of It. Roster after the jump. Maybe get some water too.

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