Happy Release Day: In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods by Matt Bell (Soho Press)

18 Jun

Photo Credit: Soho Press

Longtime Vouched favorite Matt Bell gets to take a big breath today as his debut novel, In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods, begins to devour the world today. It’s been a long-time growling, and I, and I’m sure the rest of the Vouched crew, are mega-stoked to see this novel come out of its cave.

If you don’t know Matt’s work (though let’s be for real–you probably do), he’s the author of the novella-in-stories Cataclysm Baby and the terrifyingly gorgeous short story collection How They Were Found, along with a bunch of other tremendous things. I do believe Benjamin Percy got it right when he declared, “Matt Bell is not a novelist. He is a mystic.”

Check out some previous Vouched chatter about Matt Bell:

A little write-up/round-up I did about Cataclysm Baby

This Awful Interview that Laura did with Matt

This Awful Interview that Christopher did with Matt

Right here’s a little snippet if you can’t wait:

I. Before our first encounter with the bear I had already finished building the house, or nearly so.In the hasty days that followed, I feared we moved in too fast and too early, the house’s furnishings still incomplete, the doors not all right-hinged—and in response to my worries my wife said that was no trouble, that she could quickly finish what I had mostly made.Beneath the unscrolling story of new sun and stars and then-lonely moon, she began to sing some new possessions into the interior of our house, and between the lake and the woods I heard her songs become something stronger than ever before. I returned to the woods to cut more lumber, so that I too might add to our household, might craft for her a crib and a bassinet, a table for changing diapers, all the other furnishings she desired. We labored together, and soon our task seemed complete, our house readied for what dreams we shared—the dream I had given her, of family, of husband and wife, father and mother, child and child—and when the earliest signs of my wife’s first pregnancy came they were attended with joy and celebration.

Enough enough, let’s all go over to the Soho Press page for the book to check out a further excerpt, find a time and a place to see Matt on his tour, and get the dang thing okay okay.

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Best Thing I’ve Heard This Week: Trey Moody

17 Jun

Last week, I visited Lincoln, NE for a few days. During my stay, I spent some time with the poet Trey Moody. Trey’s first book, Thought That Nature, was selected by Cole Swenson as the winner of the 2011 Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Sarabande Books will release the collection in January of next year; below are a couple video clips of Trey reading poems that will appear in it.

“Praise”:

“So Warm”:

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Best Thing I’ve Read This Week: Rachel B. Glaser in iO Issue 9

14 Jun

So, did you see it? Another stellar issue of iO scurried into the frame this week with work by Dara Wier and Bryan Beck and lot lots of other great greats. Constantly happy (even when I’m poemed into sadness or other non-happy emotion) with iO, this crisp no-longer-new online mag, now one of my favorites.

But the poems that my velcro heart got stuck on were Rachel Glaser’s two poems, “With No Desire To Call Anyone I Reach For My Phone” and “He’s Got A Camera.”

I saw her read in Boston for AWP this year. I know her books like Pee On Water from the beloved Publishing Genius Press (though sad sad honesty I’ve never read that book or as much of Rachel’s work as I mean to). But there’s always this spunk too them, not like quirky teen spunk, but like non-kid person who isn’t boring spunk. There’s not enough of that in this world.

Both these poems talk within themselves, near-ramble on about expectations and desire, until both Glaser and I are standing next to each other, finger-pointing like totally gotcha. These speak to things that too often eek on the line of shameful but are also just kinda normal goofy parts of this modern living, like both of these could be called “Tyler Gobble Poem” and “she’s like haha, bad boy, but really it’s okay we all do it, welcome to 2013.”

Here’s the beginning of “With No Desire…”–

somewhat moved in the temple
during my public speaking class
after the fireworks
I reach for my phone

“truly interesting,” I say to your story at lunch
then under the table, check my phone

deeply moved in the temple
you look at me with love
but I’m remembering my phone

and here’s the beginning of “He’s Got A Camera”–

he’s got a camera
so that means he’s a photographer
which means he’s creative
and creative guys are normally hot
hot guys struggle with math
and smoke weed instead
weed makes boys free
and freedom makes guys outdoorsy
the outdoors teach lessons
stars make guys think
the moon is fat like their mother
trees are ominous friends

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Best Thing I’ve Heard This Week: The Big Big Mess (06/08/13)

14 Jun

Last Saturday, The Big Big Mess celebrated its two-year anniversary. Over the course of the past couple of years, this Akron, OH readings series has hosted local, regional, and national writers, such as Mary Biddinger, Matt Hart, Nate Pritts, Cathy Wagner, Adam Clay, Zachary Schomburg, and Heather Christle.

At their most recent event, out-of-town poets from Albany, Atlanta, Chicago, and Louisville converged on Northeast Ohio for a terrific reading. Check out the videos below for highlights.

Sean Patrick Hill reads his poem “1972“:

James Belflower performs an excerpt from his book The Posture of Contour:

Daniela Olszewska reads her poem “Frontier with Fancy Spurs“:

Bruce Covey reads his poem “Foreign Objects“:

The Big Big Mess’ next reading will be on 05 July. They will host The Line Assembly Tour, featuring S.E. Smith and others.

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Best Thing I’ve Read Today: Dikembe Press

12 Jun

DP 001I first became aware of Dikembe Mutombo during the late-1980s when, under the tutelage of the great John Thompson, he and Alonzo Mourning formed one of the most intimidating frontcourts in the history of college basketball at Georgetown University. He then went on to have an illustrious career in The Association, popularizing his now famous finger wag.

Wasn’t it a joy, then, when I discovered the inaugural titles from the newly formed Dikembe Press, a chapbook publisher based out of Portland, OR and Lincoln, NE.

Dikembe Press’ first two titles are Matthew Rohrer’s A Ship Loaded With Sequins Has Gone Down and Emily Pettit’s Because You Can Have This Idea About Being Afraid Of Something. The second set of chapbooks, arriving sometime this summer, are already slated: as-of-yet titled manuscripts by Christian Hawkey and Christine Hume.

Rohrer’s collection begins and ends with longer, narrative poems. In between these bookend pieces are a series of four re-combinatory sonnets, each one comprised of three different variations. Take, for instance, the first iteration of the second “Sonnet” as a sample of what you can find within:

He wrote amazing poems because he
was fucking a wizard. This perspective
mutilated all his expectations
and he was naked. The wizard threw him
a small thin towel to cover himself with.
I’m sitting in a small bar in Brooklyn
discussing his next move: surely his wife
will climb the pyramid and leap off it
because she is a butterfly. He is
everywhere down there, in the air. Inside
a tiny black bean. It’s not necessary
to live like this, we decide. We crumble
into our highballs, the city outside
consumes things like an enormous creature. (17)

Emily Pettit’s collection contains thirteen poems and ten illustrations by Bianca Stone. The poems, which shift and bend through oftentimes absurdist logic, are most successful when articulating some sense of doubt, misunderstanding, or fear. For example, in the poem “You Keep Asking What I Want And I Don’t Know What I Want,” the speaker says:

                                                           We breathe air.
We keep the same body temperature all day.
We are holding onto things. An unspecified
racket. A small wagon. The biggest warehouse.
It’s ambitious and complicated. It’s a result
that is still unclear and can go either way.
I do not know what I have to make. I make
mistakes and many of them. I’m afraid I make
many mistakes. This has something to do
with the desperation and something to do
with other things too. A web of smoke holding
onto a dark night. Refusing to reflect any light. (17)

To purchase these titles and discover more information about Dikembe Press and their forthcoming releases, please visit their website.

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New Love: Julianna Spallholz

11 Jun

Amber Sparks reviewed Julianna Spallholz’s collection of stories, The State of Kansas, for Vouched on January 26. I think I was frozen at the time because somehow I missed it.

I did, however, find Julianna’s story, “The Body” in Noö [14] and am now hooked like one of those fiends I occasionally see passed out in my front yard. Maybe they just couldn’t handle all the goodness that Julianna serves up.

The body has been told that it is tall. The body has been told that it is graceful but also that it moves like some strange animal. The body didn’t know how to take that. The body is scarred where its moles have been taken. The body has never broken a bone or been stung by a bee. The body may be allergic to bees, it doesn’t know.

Read the rest of it here.

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Awful Interviews: DJ Berndt

10 Jun

DJ PicDJ Berndt is a nice, stoked writer guy. DJ Berndt just had a new (FREE) ebook, Sins of Omission, plop out from Housefire Books. DJ Berndt edits Pangur Ban Party. DJ Berndt’s new ebook is also on Goodreads. DJ Berndt is the world’s most eligible bachelor (or so I am told). DJ Berndt answered my questions below.

Your latest ebook, Sins of Omission, recently clogged into the world from Housefire Books. Housefire does books (as well as that journal of theirs) by prompt challenges. How did you get involved with them? How did this book roll out?

I met Riley while we were both working as editors for Metazen. He went on to start HOUSEFIRE and solicited me with some prompts for their website launch. Before long, I had a few pieces on the site and Riley contacted me again about doing a bigger project that would eventually become Sins of Omission. He asked me to send him 40 brand new stories in just under a week, and then we edited it down from there. It was a really fun process to write like a maniac for a week and then shape those raw ideas into something digestible.

Wow. 40 shorts in a week is definitely one way to make a writer (more of) a maniac. How did the challenge and this rush (both collapsed time frame and adrenaline of getting it done) change your process, both in obvious and less-obvious ways? I’ve been under the Riley-challenge spell before and I was surprised at how the changes to my process, when my time got pressed flat, shook up (and somehow improved) my writing. Were you surprised at the stuff (and quality of it) that this challenge inspired?

It changed my process a lot because I couldn’t stay in my head very long. Normally I edit a lot as I write, but with this challenge I had to just spill it out and move along. I think it improved the writing because it forced me to go with my first instinct and didn’t allow me to second-guess anything.

When I googled “Sins of Omission,” a novel of the same title, by Fern Michaels, popped up. Here’s a Publisher’s Weekly excerpt about that book:

In this modern-day melodrama of paradise lost, Reuben Tarz and Daniel Bishop are rescued from a French hospital at the close of WW I to share a luxurious chateau with Mickey, a sexy French marchioness. Their tranquil retreat is shaken up by the arrival of 16-year-old Bebe Rosen, daughter of an American movie mogul. Michaels creates a test of love for Reuben, Mickey and Bebe that each inevitably fails. The rest of the novel charts their punishment. Aside from Daniel and Reuben’s friendship born of the adversities of war, and Mickey’s maternal devotion to the illegitimate son born of Reuben’s rape of Bebe, no love endures, and any apparent understanding between the sexes is an illusion destined to be violently shattered. Michaels’s novels (the Texas trilogy) always evince a strong sense of morality, but here this has turned sour and vindictive. The Hollywood setting in which Bebe and Reuben work out their fates is a hollow, unconvincing cliche–as though Michaels can barely stand to ponder the ugly, despair-sodden world she depicts.

How does your book relate to that? How does your book set itself apart from the herd of “SoO” books that exist?

My book relates to this excerpt very well because while I was writing it, I received many invites to live with a sexy French marchioness at her luxurious chateau. Though in full disclosure, I receive invitations like these constantly, even if I’m not writing anything. It’s not easy being the world’s most eligible bachelor (ladies). This is also how my book separates itself from the other Sins of Omission books that exist: it was written by the world’s my eligible bachelor.

“DJ Berndt: The World’s Most Eligible Bachelor.” Man, that’s a pretty rad designation. But it must be a tricky and heavy banner to lug around. How do you handle the pressure of being the world’s most eligible bachelor? How does it affect your writing?

Being the World’s Most Eligible Bachelor is a pretty big deal. Not many people could roll with it as effortlessly as I do. But I learned a long time ago that the separation is in the preparation, and if I want to remain at my Most Eligible, I’ve got to have a plan. That’s why I spend every night alone and dateless, diligently strategizing everything I can do to stay super-duper-single.

In an interview with Meg Tuite at Connotation Press, you remarked that “When it’s flash fiction like this, I ask myself how someone like James Tate or Zachary Schomburg would do it, and try to copy that. Really most of my writing is just reading a bunch of a specific author and trying to imitate him or her. It’s hard for me to think of myself as “a writer”, and easier to think of myself as “a guy who reads a lot and can mimic what he likes”.”

I respect the straightforwardness of that answer, the honesty in that. There’s often this perception that it’s gotta be all you, or at least this super original equation of influences. I can definitely sense in this book that you’re working that skill you have, the mimicking. Who were some of the “influences” for these pieces? I saw Tate and Schomburg in here, for sure. Also, I was reminded at times of James Tadd Adcox’s book The Map of The System of Human Knowledge. Curious to see what others you were digging on during the writing of this book.

I’m a bigtime fan of Tadd’s writing, I’m glad that shows in my mimicking. The Map of The System of Human Knowledge was a game-changer for me. I also heavily mimic Socrates Adams in this collection, his style is definitely a huge influence for me. Socrates has a very special talent for making a character seem very real and common while also being completely ludicrous and absurd. I have to borrow from Socrates every time I try to write in the first person.

Between each story in the book, there’s an art piece by Lindsay Allison Ruoff, collage-type things that are their own pulsing works yet somehow they also inform the book in a rad way. I’m thinking of how you are open about your influences and how you take those into your process, your own collages of influences and styles. These pieces of yours also have a youthful liveliness to them, and I feel Lindsay’s art pieces strike out of a similar energy source. How did these come to be a part of the book? How do you feel they inform/relate to your stories?

Lindsay’s art is very rad. I was so thrilled when I first saw them. The collages seem similar in style, but also fragmented, and they build off of each other to make something much wider and crazier. I wanted my stories to feel like that too.

In the story “Always Chasing Pussy,” the narrator has a shirt with that phrase and the image of a man chasing a cat. I love the ridiculousness here, as the explanation of the shirt continues, ending in the idea that “It’s really hard to get laid when your clothes don’t fit.” Is this a real t-shirt? What’s the story behind this story?

Haha, I’m glad you like this story. A few of my relatives heard about the ebook and wanted to read it, and I would always be afraid of how they’d react to “Always Chasing Pussy.” It is a real shirt. I was in the middle of the writing frenzy that would become SoO and took a night off to go to a bar. I saw a guy wearing that exact shirt and thought “What in the world could he honestly be thinking when he puts on a shirt like that?” and then “I don’t know, but it’s going to make a hilarious story.”

What’s happening with you nowadays? What projects are you currently working on?

I’m not working on a whole lot these days. A few things are in the pipeline for Pangur Ban Party, but I think PBP is in its twilight years and doesn’t have a lot of mileage left. After the pipeline is empty, I’ll likely try to think of a way to give PBP a graceful exit. 5 years is a lot longer than I ever thought I’d be doing it, but I think it’s time to move on.

I haven’t written anything in awhile, but I’ve been reading. I’m almost done with my first time through Infinite Jest.

Do you believe in ghosts? Do you believe in ghost dogs?

I believe that ghosts and ghost dogs exist, but I don’t believe in them. Like I don’t think they have what it takes to ever realize their dreams or reach their true potentials. Ghost Air Bud would suck at basketball.

 

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Best Thing I’ve Read This Week: Debacle Debacle

10 Jun

debacle2In February of this year, H_NGM_N Books released Matt Hart’s Debacle Debacle. In some sense, the book can be read as the experience of working through contradictory thoughts and feelings.

To this extent, poems near the beginning of book guide the reader by setting the conceptual and poetic framework for the rest of the collection. In “Upon Seeing Again The Thriving,” the speaker informs the audience that “Life is so messy,” and:

                                                               yes, I do feel

terrible at times, like a fuck-up descending a staircase,
woozy with nectar and too much trouble. Frustration

I get, and discouraged I get. (20)

Likewise, in the title poem, the speaker reiterates similar claims when he states: “Positivity these days // is difficult to come by” (14). But in the face of frustration and discouragement, when filtering the world through a positive lens can oftentimes be difficult, Hart’s poems seek to do just that.

Of course, the poems of Debacle Debacle don’t do this by embracing affirmation uncritically. Instead, they do so by meditating on complex emotional circumstances of our daily lives; or, as Hart writes at the conclusion of the title poem:

                                                                          Life happens;
it’s my job to say so. It’s our job to express it, expand it
to the edges. Essential it is to struggle, but struggle’s

merely tension, and tension can be a thing of balance
or irritation, confusion or song. I’m singing in tension
with the not singing. I’m living in tension with the forces

out to kill me. We’re living in tension because we’re
different human beings, and living in excitement
that we’re so much the same. (15)

Debacle Debacle, then, harnesses this tension between the joy and struggle to both sing and not-sing as an expression of a life lived poetically.

Hart’s poems succeed the most when they yoke these tensions of life so as to produce “an ambiguous noise” (30) wherein one cannot necessarily tell which feeling the poem expresses, or, to this extent, whether it’s song or not-song. The poem “Fang Face” echoes these sentiments in its closing lines:

                                    I hate the way stories
seem to love a conclusion. I love
the bird’s singing just before it gets eaten. (25)

The excerpt contains both “love” and “hate,” the song of a bird and its grizzly death, and a reproach of conclusions in its conclusion. By oscillating between these binary poles, Hart doesn’t offer didactic verse, but rather “expressive works… // …about the way the artist feels and thinks” (73). And this artist, it seems, thrives in the possibilities and tensions that a poem with open emotional and sonic registers offers us.

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Best Thing I’ve Read This Week: B.J. Love

6 Jun

6_QuickB.J. Love is a poet who authored the chapbook Michigander, the editor of the online audio journal Pretty LIT, co-host of the Seersucker reading series (with Erika Jo Brown), and teaches at Savannah State University. Additionally, he used to run Further Adventures Press, which released a number of terrific, handmade chapbooks between 2008 and 2011. Yes, Love is a bit of Renaissance Man when it comes to poetry.

Earlier this week, I read a pamphlet of collaborative poems he wrote with Friedrich Kerksieck (the brains behind Small Fires Press) titled Six Quick Sand Pits. The colophon for the collection reads:

These quicksand pits were written collaboratively by BJ Love & Friedrich Kerksieck. This booklet was printed for Parenthesis 23 in the blazing Memphis summer of 2012. It was printed with a Vandercook No. 4 on Somerset Book paper. Type is Gill Sans.

If the specifications don’t mean much to you, know this: just like everything Kerksieck prints and produces, it looks gorgeous. And the six sand pits within? They are wonderfully odd prose poems. Take, for instance, the opening pit:

Sand and Water wanted a baby. What beautiful coastline we could make, they’d say to each other just before having sex in the usual positions. When quick sand bubbled up nine months later, Sand and Water sank the disappointment deep below the Earth’s crust. I don’t want to say this is why we now have volcanoes, but I can’t say it’s not.

The other five pits read in a similar tone and style. I’m not sure exactly how one would get their hands on this short collection (in fact, I’m not entirely sure how I got my hands on this collection), but you can read more of Love and Kerksieck’s collaborative poems in their chapbook Fossil, which they released via the Dusie Kollektiv a couple years ago.

Last week, I received the new issue of Cant in the mail, which contains eight poems by Love. To this extent, they act as the centerpiece for the issue. Here is one of those poems, “Grammatical Benjamin,” in its entirety:

I feel like I should be making more
telephone calls. That I could be better
at talking if I committed to a more rigid
practice schedule and insisted on using
the English to Feelings dictionary we
bought that night we couldn’t think of
the word that meant half-priced sushi.

When I put my hand in your hand, this
it tells us, is what we mean: Something
really necessary appears to be happening. (17)

The rest of the poems follow a likeminded trajectory: texts composed in a conversational idiom that, thematically, read as somewhat oblique love poems. To read more poems by B.J. Love (as well as work Aaron Belz, Matt Hart, and a terrific interview with Laura Solomon) order a copy of Cant.

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2013 Springgun Press Releases

31 May

Last year, Springgun Press released its first offering of full-length collections: Lily Ladewig’s The Silhouettes, Adam Peterson’s The Flasher, and The Container Store, which is a collaborative text written by Joe Hall and Chad Hardy. For their second round of full-lengths, Springgun published three more solid collections: James Belflower’s The Posture of Contour: A Public Primier, Michael Flatt’s Absent Receiver, and Aby Kaupang’s Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me.

photo MF1_zpsc9e4ef01.jpg photo AK01_zps6d145db9.jpg

A conversation with Belflower discussing his Posture will appear on this site in the coming weeks; so I will focus my attention on the other two collections.

Flatt’s Absent Receiver opens, literally, with a microphone check: “check // check // check // check” (1); then proceeds to explore sound as both an object of study and as a form of study. Take, for instance, the following passage:

through the narcissism of reverb

we expect big things from small ones.

the propeller thrums the night

and electric light

brings blackground into relief.

in this space my open mouth

does not create a cavern. (32)

The excerpt begins with a meditation on the nature of reverb, and its ability transform “small” sounds into bigger ones. But there is more than meditation here; the form itself also contains a music in the hard rhyme of “night” and “light,” as well as the consonance of “create” and “cavern.” The reverb(eration) of phonemes in rhyme and alliteration, it would appear, propel the poem forward with their sonic thrums.

To this extent, then, Absent Receiver looks to travel “deep in the sound” of poetry in order to “deepen / the sound” (69) of the poems. In doing so, “the page” becomes “an amplifier” (47) through which Flatt sounds his songs; and the sounds, it would seem, are emotive:

the inside of a poem
isn’t anything
anyone needs to be shown.

the illiterate already know it
as the space between the
heartbeat and the heart. (46)

While Flatt’s preoccupations deal primarily with sound, Kaupang’s, Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me focuses mainly on the body and its various permutations. Take, for instance, the following segments from the poem “Scenic Fences”:

the body                    {that other body you
respond to—the one you reap}

refuses to wake
writes grieve

in the rainbed       the basalt       the mobile
choking over the baby’s crib (30)

…

return the body       {the one you
resound to}       lose it       once

and leave

be sad at the demolition of house (37)

…

ménage-a-toi

the bodies beside
the body       {you
sometimes}       and lying
there and trying
accidentally appear too

misaddress invitations for
other men’s pockets (43)

Over the course of these three passages, one body “refuses to wake,” calling into question our agency over the very thing we think we control; and “writes grieve,” thus undermining normative conceptions of Cartesian dualism, wherein the ability to write, think, or communicate resides, first and foremost, in the mind. Likewise, the body is a space to which we can return, we can lose or leave, or, like a house, be demolished. Kaupang’s collection contains a plethora of bodies that function in many different ways. Yes, this is the multiplicity of the body.

The proliferation of bodies, then, disassociates corporeal selves from the concept of identity and, more specifically, the pronoun “I.” As such, “I is useless in the dung / of words that name” (57), because “a name means nothing,” whether it be “I,” another pronoun, or a proper noun. But Little “g” God Grows Tired of Me is not a lament for a lost sense of self. Instead, the collection offers us an “exchange”: in place of a determinate “I” residing in a particular corporeal body, “I inhabit[s] innumerable houses // your “body / in jeopardy” (73). By placing the body and the self in jeopardy, though, we attain a fluidity heretofore unattained.

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