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La Petite Zine

27 Apr

The new issue of La Petite Zine is up, and it’s chock full of good stuff.

Like this gem from Brooklyn Copeland, for instance:

To find the dagger a blessing

daggers find us tripping
onto praise—
           please

stop singing mine—
           April’ s
                god’s a gun

I get the irony here, of course, praising Brooklyn’s poem “Straddling the Ides,” a poem that asks, “please // stop singing mine.” (Sorry, Brooklyn.)

Or this one from Anne Marie Rooney, titled “Film Mind“:

This is an idea,
Let it holler open in your skin, let it let
My mastery in, let it out.

I’m off the ‘net for now, making a short trip to Jacksonville, but I hope you make our way over to LPZ to read these poems in full and to check out the rest of this issue–you won’t be disappointed.

Single-Sentence Review: THIS IS WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST by Ben Hersey

26 Apr

The man flapping out his Whitman-inspired glow at a recent event

THIS IS WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST
by Ben Hersey
The Chuckwagon, 2008, $4 (postage included)

Ben Hersey came to Indiana for the last Vouched Presents Reading and read, no no silly, the right word is performed, or maybe exploded is an even better word, stomping around in a hockey jersey, doing some wild stuff with lettuce, chomping and sniffing and whatever, pulling this character, angry and afraid from Boston, unstable and shouting, from his body, and here in this book those words, those beautiful tragic scary scenes Hersey expelled from his body, are captured, quite remarkably, quite intact, as much as can be hoped, proving this shit can be shaking in person, but even on the page, man, his take on rattly emotion and fucked-up existence thrives.

An awesome excerpt at The Chuckwagon (where you can buy this wonderful thing for only four bucks!)

Say When at PANK

25 Apr

Hat tip to Carrie Murphy, who posted a link to this poem over at her food/literature blog, Plums in the Icebox. Unfortunately, this poem was published in the February issue of PANK, which I completely skipped over due to a breakdown wherein I marked-as-read everything single thing in my Google Reader, simply because I couldn’t handle knowing I had 150+ items left to read, and I hated life then.

I wish I hadn’t done that now. If I hadn’t, then I would’ve found this incredible poem by Sophie Klahr among all that, and perhaps it would’ve lifted me, if only for a few moments.

if you are a man made of birds
if you are a bureau

if chest, if cage

if you are a lovely weather
worn out, say when

if the space between us makes
a dog named vacancy

if I contain all possible crimes

Read the rest at PANK, please.

VICTORY by Ben Kopel

24 Apr

VICTORY by Ben Kopel
H_NGM_N BKS, January 2012
112 pages,  $14.95

I feel lucky that I came in contact with this book.  I hadn’t caught word of it ‘til Nate Pritts at H_NGM_N asked me to design promotional buttons for the thing.  He sent me three of them in the mail along with the book, which looks like it can cut you open.

One of the epigrams comes from Patti Smith:  I’ll give you one tip:  use your fists.  Here is a sizable chunk of the opening poem, “Gymnasium of the Sacred Heart,” which throws its fists like fight and celebration:

Two boys, wearing track jackets,
with shaved heads and smooth hands,
are breathing Pine-Sol out of
a plastic bag and breaking
into a car with coat hangers.
Sad, thin-skinned kids with flammable
names and feathers for lungs.
Who tape their regrets to the top of the Atari.
Who write out their girlfriends’ names in gasoline.
Who take a match to the front yard
before cutting a path through police tape
to get to a tall, cool, catholic school gym.
From the bleachers they stand as if to say
I sing for the canary gassed beyond belief
in the basement of the biology building.
I scream City of Love! City by the River!
Don’t disown your skinny fisted sons
locked inside the locker room.
They too are the father of you.
They too are made mostly of noise.

Reading Kopel’s book reminds me of listening to early U2 for the first time at 14, falling hard for how they were honest and wounded yet on fire, totally present and alive.  Bono’s mother died when he was 14, and his lyrics often wrestle with his growing up as a boy desperate to fill her absence.  VICTORY possesses that same fierce youthfulness, an anthem for beautiful and ragged sons who grow up keying names into car doors, kissing in parking lots, and hungering for whatever genuine loves can fill the absences they carry.

The only reason I didn’t finish the thing in one sitting was having to work and I’m going back through, being blown away again by these poems.  If you’re  not convinced, here’s another fireball called “Because We Must:”

The kids from the federal
tanning booths have burned
down the Dairy Queen again.

Everyone died warm
& no one was alone.

. .

. .

We had a good time.  I remember ice cream.
I remember legs.  I remember gym shorts.

. .

. .

A prayer, now
& at the hour of our death –
Fill me with yr light inside this car.
Fill me with yr light.

Available from:
H_NGM_N BKS | Powell’s | Amazon

SIXTH FINCH DOES IT AGAIN

19 Apr

Maybe it’s rude or not cool to talk like this, but who am I so I’ll say it: my last three rejections from Sixth Finch have echoed “These are so close! Keep trying!” which could mean any number of things, but after reading that new digital stack of goodness the Sixth Finch crew has assembled, I’m kind of like “Shooo-weee, I’m glad they said no.” Sincerely, honestly, down right, my poems don’t belong in this issue, or any of their issues yet. Sixth Finch is one of my two or three go-to-the-day-it-drops poetry journals and they haven’t let up, man.

Like “Lying” by Molly Brodak, fleeting and contemplative, and I feel kinda how I feel in a big used bookstore, the centuries of thoughts in stacks, the unending search, here collapsed, compressed, into this neat little pile.

Like “The Seep-Child” by G.C. Waldrep, a growing flame about fire and the burning and people, how they burn, and here in this word hunk, I follow, amazed at how it moves and shines, this idea of fire pushed and pressed on and on.

Like “from Pink and Grey” by Dan Boehl, this reminder of how inside a simple scene, a moment, always this hulking gap, this hunk of missing.

And the art, too, snagging its own rightful spot alongside the words, always crisp, startling depictions of thewhat’s up.

CHECK OUT THIS WHOLE ISSUE FOR REAL

Nate Pritts at Dark Sky

12 Apr

I was reading a bit of Dark Sky Magazine earlier today and ran across Nate Pritts’s poem “No Memorial”:

I will not ever need to answer to anyone
     about why something isn’t where it should be in my heart.

It’s a poem that moves in interesting ways. Join me over there and give it a read, won’t you?

Rob MacDonald at La Petite Zine

6 Apr

Take a moment on this fine Friday afternoon (windy here in central Florida, but fine nonetheless) to travel over to check out Rob MacDonald’s poem “The First Girl” over at La Petite Zine.

(That’s right, as in Rob MacDonald from Sixth Finch.)

Here’s just a taste to whet your appetite:

When I say that she was the greatest,
I mean that she resembled a circus.

SS Review: to the river by Rose Hunter

11 Mar

to the river by Rose Hunter

Artistically Declined Press, 2010

96 pages, $9

A trip is from point A to point B, whether places with cafes and other faces or from standing up to flat on your back or word to word, and that is what Rose does best in these poems, what makes these poems flare in their images, flicker in their journeys, the individual trips being startling, awakening, moving.

Forthcoming!

8 Mar

Everyday Genius has been doing its cool usual thing, everyday content of hmmmm….goodness. Lately, it has been excerpts from forthcoming titles. Rad rad rad forthcoming titles.

Like J. A. Tyler’s When We Hold Our Hands (Dark Sky Books)–

When our house becomes a boat there will be all the canned goods lining the shelves and in the pitch of our movements the food will roll our hallways and clunk down the stairs and make its way out the front door. We will have left it open to go and see if this morning, unlike other mornings, the sky will not be red.

Like Zachary Schomburg’s Fjords vol.1 (Black Ocean)–

On the other side is a mountain town. The air is clean and cold. I can hear the ice breaking in the distance. There is a woman in a long black dress and a black scarf over her face. Welcome to Spitzbergen she says. Then she lifts up her dress. Nothing happens next.

Like the pieces from today from Laurie Saurborn Young’s Carnavoria (H_NGM_N)–

Translated from the Russian

One notices without fidelity
how moss covets stone

and ice crystals build
themselves into cold dirt.

Existence repays the favor
and it becomes easier to love

parenthetically, without ever
mentioning the breasts.

My AWP Haul: FJORDS Vol. 1

6 Mar

Like many of you, I spent an exciting and exhausting weekendish at AWP in Chicago. I read stuff, took in readings, slung books for the first time with the Vouched crew(!!) saw old friends and new friends, ate way too much food and drank way too much beer, talked until the wee hours of the morning about literature and books and movies and music, and cleaned up at the book fair. It was magical.

I took a couple of extra days off work after I got back on Sunday to just chill, detox, be inspired, write, and read. And I’ve been thinking–what better way to drag out the magic that is AWP than to talk about all the books I bought there, little by little by little? Yes, bittersweet. But also rewarding, in a way that I think you will like, too.

  • So, first up: Zachary Schomburg’s FJORDS vol. I. I have to admit, the Black Ocean table was the first one I hit up at the book fair. I was laser-focused, looking for this book like a questing knight. When I got it home, I immediately devoured it, and found it so painfully sad, so beautifully made, so original and funny and insightful and so even better than anything else he’s ever written, that I kind of wanted to just give up writing and buy a hundred copies of this book and hand it out instead, everywhere I go. The book focuses on a bunch of “little deaths” that live on the fjords of the title, coming for Schomburg slowly but surely, and concentrates on disappointment, loss, death, love, and the beauty in all of the sadness. The joy in all of the blackness. Schomburg keeps writing these things that just break your fucking heart, over and over and over, into little tiny shards of glass that glimmer and gleam in the light like his poetry. Things like this:

I don’t know how best to tell you about the angel, about what death really is. It seems so implausible until it happens. You start to sweat and you get swallowed into the dark. then you’re swinging on a rope over a beautiful cliff, only there’s no such thing as beauty.

Or this:

The truth is there is no such thing as spells. The world is always as it is, and always as it seems. And love is just our own kind voice that we whisper into our own blood.

The only thing to do with poems like this is absorb them into your body. Or the only thing to do with poems like this is to sit back, apart, and watch as they try to make you feel something. And be amazed and breathless and struck dumb when they succeed, utterly, completely. Ouch. And wow.

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