The Lovely Arc

It ain't dead, it's just different.

2011-06-21T17:53:00.000-07:00

After 6 1/2 years and 1510 posts, The Lovely Arc has grown a bit tired in this space. Instead, adjust yr knobs, and follow it over here at tumblr. It'll pretty much be the same thing (mostly photos, but now they can be tagged and organized). C'mon, let's go. It'll be ok.

2011-06-06T11:05:00.000-07:00

If you're interested in a sneak peek of a forthcoming book of poems, Fjords, you should check out these new issues of Lumina, Tin House, and Filter.

2011-06-05T15:43:00.000-07:00

2011-06-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

2011-06-02T13:19:00.000-07:00

Thank you, Ryan Donaldson, for your article about the Bad Blood Reading Series in the last Portland Monthly.

2011-05-27T14:39:00.000-07:00

Bad Blood #6 is on its way, next Saturday, June 4. Graham Foust, Emily Kendal Frey, and John Niekrasz. Work/Sound. 820 SE Alder. 7pm mingle time. Come out from your awesome hiding spot.

2011-05-27T14:35:00.000-07:00

Picked up my summer fiction reading list at Powell's today:

Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov
Geek Love by Katherine Dunn
Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

2011-05-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

2011-05-15T11:59:00.000-07:00

Some new books are coming your way, July 1. Everything is going to be ok.

2011-05-10T12:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Portland, next Thursday: Joshua Beckman, Anthony McCann, and Jamalieh Haley at Bad Blood 5. It's kind of a big deal.

2011-05-04T14:10:00.000-07:00

I'm telling a true story about my misfitness on the Back Fence PDX stage at the Mission Theater on Thursday, May 26. I'll be one of five story tellers for the evening. You can make reservations now, if you're into it.

2011-05-02T11:36:00.000-07:00

A preview of the first issue of a new poetry journal, iO, has a poem of mine called "Tiny Castles" stuck in it.

2011-05-02T11:29:00.000-07:00

2011-04-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

Dear poets, you have through the weekend to submit your full-length poetry manuscripts to the Octopus Books' April open reading period. You can submit electronically, by email attachment. We make the manuscripts anonymous, and by a committee of 8, we will select two or so for publication. And between you and me, the numbers are historically low this year, so get on it.

2011-04-26T13:07:00.000-07:00

All dressed up, but no award to accept. I even wore my lucky skeleton gloves to the event. Alas! Congratulations to David Biespiel for winning the Stafford/Hall Award for poetry at the Oregon Book Awards last night for his book, The Book of Men and Women. Read about the event here.

2011-04-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

I'm leading a workshop at the Nebraska Summer Writer's Conference on June 11th and 12th. It is going to be hot. Meet me in the fountain in front of the student union building, and then meet me at Yia's Yia's after.

2011-04-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of voting for the Oregon Readers' Choice Award. The polls close at 5pm. Maybe you'd want to go here and cast your vote for one of the books on the list (special note: Scary, No Scary is on this list).

2011-04-16T15:29:00.001-07:00

2011-04-12T17:18:00.000-07:00

Bad Blood #4, starring poets Joe Wenderoth and Tony Tost, and music from Danielle Sullivan & Kyle Morton, will go down at Crema, afterhours, 28th and SE Ankeny, this Friday at 8pm. Like always, bring a 5-er for the happy jar, and feel free to enjoy a few beers, some BB#4 ephemera, and killer poetry and killer music.

2011-04-09T14:29:00.000-07:00

I've been asked to contribute a poem to Hannah, an anthology of collaborations between painters and poets. Here is a current pre-press line-up of the match-ups. I've selected this painting by Gary Webb. I think I am going to write about a death at a picnic.

2011-04-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

Portland's own Typhoon is having a record release party for A New Kind of House, released last month on Tender Loving Empire. My poem, "Taking Out the Garbage," a poem I wrote for the band's lead singer and songwriter, Kyle Morton, is included in the album's liner notes.

2011-04-06T13:53:00.000-07:00

John Cotner wrote a piece about the chapbook fair last month for Bookslut. He failed to mention how Nat Otting kept punching himself in the eye.

2011-04-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

The postminimalist composer, Eve Beglarian, will perform "Testy Pony," a piece that she has arranged to my poem of the same name, as part of her performance, One Mississippi...River as Muse, at the Alberta Rose Theater in Portland on Friday, April 8. Watch this video to learn more about Friday night's program.

2011-04-03T19:39:00.000-07:00

2011-03-31T15:27:00.000-07:00

Happy opening day, nerds. My 2011 predictions:

AL East: Red Sox
AL Central: Twins
AL West: A's
Wildcard: Detroit
NL East: Phillies
NL Central: Brewers
NL West: Rockies
Wildcard: Braves

AL Champ: Twins
NL Champ: Braves

World Series Champ: Twins

2011-03-30T16:46:00.000-07:00

Some of what my students will be reading as we write poems in my spring introductory workshop:

Triggering Town by Richard Hugo
The Art of Recklessness by Dean Young
Texture Notes by Sawako Nakayasu
A Mouth in California by Graham Foust
Black Life by Dorothea Lasky
Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle
The Grief Performance by Emily Kendal Frey
"Vespers" by Heather Christle
"The Bad Clown" by Michael Earl Craig
"Birches" by Robert Frost
"Sunday Morning" by Wallace Stevens
"The Waking" by Theodore Roethke
"One Art" and "Sonnet" by Elizabeth Bishop
"Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" by Dylan Thomas
"Short Talk on Sleep Stones" and "Short Talk on Walking Backwards" by Anne Carson
"Dolphin" by Robert Lowell
"The Ache of Marriage" by Denise Levertov
"Homosexuality" by Frank O'Hara
"Swans of Local Waters" by Tony Tost
"Song for One Violin" by Julie Doxsee
"9 'Great citadels whereon the gold sun falls'" by John Berryman
"The Fall" by Russell Edson
"Oatmeal Deluxe" by Stephen Dobyns
"Chicago" by Carl Sandburg
"The Dance" by William Carlos Williams
"Traveling Through the Dark" by William Stafford
"Bavarian Gentians" by DH Lawrence
"Sea Rose" by HD
"Buffalo Bill's/defunct" by e.e. cummings
"Peggy in the Twilight" and "Distance from Loved Ones" by James Tate
"2 Narrative Poems" by Julie Carr
"Hot Ass Poem" by Jennifer Knox
"Wanting to Die" by Anne Sexton
"Invisible Scoring" by Paul Killebrew
"Patience" by Pierre Reverdy
"The Mystery is the Human Heart" by Matthew Dickman
"I Hail from the Bottom of the Sea, the Land of Eternal Darkness" by Matthew Rohrer
"I Go Back to May 1937" by Sharon Olds
"I Have to Go Back to 1994 to Kill a Girl" by Karyna McGlynn
"Digging" by Seamus Heaney
"Cameroon is Great" by Ara Shirinyan
"Wild Nights--Wild Nights" and "I cannot live with You" by Emily Dickinson
from "New Exercises 08" by Franck Andre Jamme
"the state of world affairs from a 3rd floor window" by Charles Bukowski
"homage to my hips" by Lucille Clifton
"Breasts" by Charles Simic
...and many more...and
literary journals
online magazines
some small press chapbooks

2011-03-27T11:22:00.000-07:00

2011-03-22T16:36:00.000-07:00

I badly want this painting (top) by Ian Huebert, the artist who is currently working on the illustrations for my next book, Viking. I also badly want this painting (bottom) by my friend Jake Gillespie. My birthday might be coming up.

2011-03-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty weak fantasy team last year, and came in 9th of 15. But for this year, what do you think of my chances?

C Joe Mauer (Twins)
1B Kevin Youkilis (Red Sox)
2B Chone Figgins (Mariners)
3B Aramis Ramirez (Cubs)
SS Hanley Ramirez (Marlins)
CI Adam LaRoche (Nationals)
MI Ben Zobrist (Rays)
LF Rajai Davis (Blue Jays)
CF Jayson Werth (Nationals)
RF Torii Hunter (Angels)
OF Jason Kubel (Twins)
Util Jim Thome (Twins)
Bench Justin Smoak (CI) (Mariners)
Bench Desmond Jennings (OF) (Rays)

SP Jared Weaver (Angels)
SP John Lackey (Red Sox)
SP Josh Beckett (Red Sox)
SP Jeremy Hellickson (Rays)
SP Scott Baker (Twins)
RP Jonathan Papelbon (Red Sox)
RP Chris Perez (Indians)
RP Matt Capps (Twins)
RP Bobby Jenks (Red Sox)

2011-03-15T23:42:00.000-07:00

Portland, look what we've lined up for you. Ok? See you there. High five.

2011-03-14T15:37:00.000-07:00

Before I read a poem or two from Scary, No Scary at the Oregon Literary Arts event honoring the National Book Foundation on April 7, I'm going to have a few things to say about my admiration of James Tate's Worshipful Company of Fletchers (1994 winner) and maybe a little bit about Alan Dugan's New and Complete (2001's winner), or Jean Valentine's Door in the Mountain (2004's winner).

2011-03-12T21:36:00.000-08:00

2011-03-10T12:24:00.000-08:00

Jason Polan is in town to set up his show at Work/Sound which is going to open this Friday, 3/11. This is his blog, which links to all his projects, one of which is the Taco Bell Drawing Club. I was part of the Taco Bell Drawing Club in Portland yesterday, and Jason made me an official member.

2011-03-09T13:52:00.000-08:00

Today, I kinda feel like these two things added together again.

2011-03-07T08:22:00.000-08:00

2011-03-06T11:54:00.000-08:00

I would like to claim that I was the first visitor to Jared White and Farrah Field's new poetry bookshop, Berl's, in the Brooklyn Flea Market. They are a quality carrier of Octopus Books, and a good friend of PressPressPress.

2011-03-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

2011-03-05T07:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Brooklyn, I am reading in you at the CROWD on Sunday. Dear Portland, I am reading in you at Small Doggies on Thursday. Dear Eugene, I am reading in you at the Windfall the following Tuesday.

2011-02-28T21:10:00.000-08:00

I made a music video for a song called "Wrong Things" by Cactus Cooler. You can watch it on my Vimeo page here. If you watch closely, you'll find The Girl Without Arms by Brandon Shimoda, published recently from Black Ocean, and you'll find a painting of mine.

2011-02-28T08:13:00.000-08:00

2011-02-25T16:35:00.001-08:00

Stick a fjork in it.

FJORDS
Table of Contents

What Would Kill Me
Fjords of Deaths
Tunguska Event
Because it Comes Right at You Does Not Mean
It Comes to Save You
Knifencer
Terrible Deer
Airplane
Lake
First Time in Paris
Magazine Stand
The Difference Between Sadness and Suffering
Someone Falls in Love with Someone
The Animal Spell
Death Letter
Unkind Swans
Meat Counter
The Woman Who Falls From the Sky
Movie Theater
New Dress Shirt
Super D
Squirrel Problem
Mermaid Problem
Breath-Holding Championship
New Job Serving Fried Pies
Refrigerator General
Large Refrigerator of the Valley
Testy Pony
Staring Problem
Lost Forest of Nakai
The Person Who Was Expected
The People with Arms
Behind a Wall of Animals
Tiny Castles
A Life in Space
Miner Death
I Love Your Fighting Style
The One About the Robbers
The Donut Hawk
Don't Step on the Frog
After Taking Out the Garbage for the First Time
The Search
Fishing for Stingrays
Hands
Costa Rica
Building of Unseen Cats
The Killing Trees
Neighborhood Plague
Leaving the House
The Correct Shape
I am the Dead Person Inside Me
What I Did with the Rock
Casting Out the King of Boys

2011-02-24T22:08:00.000-08:00

2011-02-24T14:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Portland, may I recommend you check out what is happening at the new Crow Arts Manor this summer? Emily Kendal Frey is teaching a poetry workshop, I am teaching a poetry workshop, and so are a few other PDX poets (TBA). There are descriptions here.

2011-02-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

2011-02-20T21:11:00.000-08:00

2011-02-18T07:43:00.000-08:00

2011-02-17T09:07:00.000-08:00

2011-02-16T09:17:00.000-08:00

2011-02-16T07:59:00.000-08:00

I wrote an essay on the poetry of Grace Bauer, my Ph.D. advisor and committee chair at the University of Nebraska, which was just published in Of a Monstrous Child (Lost Horse Press 2011) edited by Nate Liederbach and James Harris. It focuses, in part, on the relationship we developed as mentor and mentee despite the differences in vision for our own poems.

2011-02-16T07:42:00.000-08:00

I made a short film about Guy Pettit called Who is Guy Pettit?

2011-02-15T19:39:00.000-08:00

I was a poet-in-residence at Flying Object in Hadley, Massachusetts, on Monday.

2011-02-14T14:02:00.000-08:00

The red line.

2011-02-11T12:54:00.000-08:00

This is an early draft image of Scary, No Scary made by Denny Schmickle. Can you see the faint outline of the mirror-image boy on the right? I like that. I thought maybe you would find this interesting.

SNS is going to go into a second printing soon, and next week there is a Black Ocean sale on the last remaining hardcovers. The hardcovers are signed and numbered, and come with a letterpressed mini-broadside courtesy of Brave Men Press. If you buy a hardcover, you get a free Black Ocean book, depending which day of next week you make your purchase.

Also, if you like SNS, you should know that it has been named a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards. The Oregonian is sponsoring a Reader's Choice Award and you can vote for SNS (or another book) through their website. You should, ok?

2011-02-10T11:10:00.000-08:00

2011-02-08T07:45:00.000-08:00

I will be the guest resident at Flying Object in Amherst this coming Sunday, 2/13. You should come hang out with us. But if you can't do that, you should come to Flying Object on Monday, 2/14, with your Valentine sweetie, to hear me read some love poems. I will skype in two of Portland's finest poets: Emily Kendal Frey and James Gendron.

Or, if you're on the other side of Massachusetts, come hear me read this Saturday, 2/12, at Lorem Ipsum Books in Cambridge with Joanna Klink, Stephanie Adams-Santos and Janaka Stucky.

2011-02-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

2011-02-02T04:35:00.000-08:00

2011-01-29T22:20:00.000-08:00

2011-01-23T13:38:00.000-08:00

There's a new issue of Sixth Finch out, and it is free to the public. I have two poems in there, if you're interested.

2011-01-23T13:31:00.000-08:00

2011-01-21T00:39:00.000-08:00

2011-01-18T14:02:00.000-08:00

Thank you, Nat Otting, for the Portland shout out on HTMLGiant. He gives Genya Turovskaya's new Octopus chap some props, and a big hi five to the small press scene here in Rip City. Semi-pro to the grave.

2011-01-12T17:48:00.000-08:00

Maybe buy this lovely new chapbook from Octopus Books I was talking about earlier? It's not backward.

2011-01-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

Dear Portland-based Charles Olson fans, on Friday I will be a participant in the first third of a marathon reading of Maximus Poems at the Switchyard Studios from 4 to 9. Come bring your pillows, your good will, your gigantic beating heart.

2011-01-07T10:07:00.000-08:00

Black Ocean 4 Life! Get a tattoo, get their books free for life. Check it.

Also, Octopus Books'll get on this wagon too. If you show me or Mathias yr Octopus Books tatt, our books are always yours. I'm thinking the one eared rabbit from The Difficult Farm, or the skeleton hands from Tuned Droves. Any other small press going to step up for the lifetimers?

2011-01-05T17:53:00.000-08:00

I have three poems from FJORDS, a manuscript in progress, in the second issue of Paperbag.

2011-01-05T14:28:00.000-08:00

2011-01-03T10:54:00.000-08:00

I interview Michael Earl Craig about Thin Kimono for HTMLGiant. So.

2010-12-30T12:43:00.000-08:00

Asteroid (trailer) from Zachary Schomburg on Vimeo.

Last spring, I drove around the country in support of Scary, No Scary and decided to make a feature-length road-trip poem-film while I was at it. Here is a trailer for the film, Asteroid, which will be released by Rabbit Light Movies in June 2011.

2010-12-30T10:04:00.000-08:00

Genya Turovskaya’s second chapbook with Octopus Books, New Year’s Day, is now available for purchase just in time for the first day of your new year. $8.

If you purchase New Year's Day by midnight at the end of New Year's Day, Octopus Books will you send any full-length title from our catalog for free (and, as always, with free shipping). Be sure to write which title you'd like in the paypal purchase comments field.

New Year's Day consists of poems of crisis & potential. The past washes away & the present is pure possibility, yet the speaker in the existential moment can only feint & jab at emotional grounding. Turovskaya’s crystalline lyricism conveys a fraught depth through both restraint & exclamation, remaining consistent in their heartrending exactitude.

Genya Turovskaya is a poet, translator and practicing psychotherapist. She was born in Kiev, Ukraine and grew up in New York City. She is the author of the chapbooks Calendar (UDP 2002), and The Tides (Octopus Books 2007). Her poetry and translations of contemporary Russian poets have appeared in Chicago Review, Conjunctions, A Public Space, Aufgabe, Octopus, jubilat, Supermachine, Gulf Coast and other publications. Her translation of Aleksandr Skidan’s Red Shifting was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2008. She is the co-translator (with Stephanie Sandler) of Elena Fanailova’s Russian Version (UDP 2010) which won the University of Rochester’s Three Percent 2010 award for Best Translated Book of Poetry. She has been the recipient of various awards and fellowships including a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Montana Artist Refuge Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Translation Residency at Santa Fe Art Institute, and a Fund for Poetry grant. She holds an MFA from Bard College and lives in Brooklyn, New York where she is the Associate Editor of the Eastern European Poets Series at Ugly Duckling Presse.

2010-12-29T12:17:00.000-08:00

2010-12-22T16:35:00.000-08:00

Octopus Books' own Heather Christle, and her The Difficult Farm, made the top 50 best selling books of 2010 at Small Press Distribution. SPD is having a 2010 Kiss Off sale, which means you can buy this book, and 49 other great best selling poetry titles for 30% off. Congrats Heather!

2010-12-20T00:28:00.000-08:00

2010-12-20T00:23:00.000-08:00

2010-12-18T11:16:00.000-08:00

This is where I live: where young people go to retire. Portlandia is premiering a month from now. Of course, no one I know here has a TV, so we'll have to gather around the website.

2010-12-17T17:37:00.000-08:00

Poor Claudia 4 is out. The SRVIVL issue. It's not exactly Russian Futurism, but it kinda looks like it. Portland, represent.

2010-12-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

Some pieces from a new book, Viking, continue to get serialized in the second issue of Dear Navigator, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's electronic poetry/art magazine. The whole book will be published by McSweeney's in 2012.

2010-12-15T11:57:00.000-08:00

I have talented film-maker friends from my days in Lincoln, NE. Elisabeth Reinkordt has just finished co-producing a feature-length documentary called When We Stop Counting that examines the education of 6 Hispanic high school students in the public school system of Crete, NE. And Jake Gillespie has finished his second dvd of experimental shorts, Telegraph Telegraph. Represent.

2010-12-12T11:27:00.000-08:00

2010-12-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

Black Ocean is holding a fund raising campaign this month called the Big Black Heart Campaign to raise some operating costs for next year. Of course, you can buy a book, but if you've already collected them all, you can buy other things like broadsides and t-shirts, or a personal postcard, phone reading, or private reading from an author. Apparently, that means if you pay enough, I (or any author you'd choose) could find myself with a pocketful of poems on a plane pointed at your place. In the name of poetry!

2010-12-08T12:39:00.000-08:00

Octopus Books is going to have a table at the Publication Studio's Publication Fair again this year. Sunday, December 19 from 11 am to 7 pm at The Cleaners downtown. It's free, but the books will cost you, so come with a $20 bill and ask me about our special deals.

2010-12-07T16:39:00.000-08:00

I've signed on to be a faculty mentor at the University of Nebraska Low-Residency MFA program in poetry starting this winter term. If you need an MFA in poetry, I can help you with that. Here is a trucking map to Nebraska City.

2010-12-07T16:28:00.000-08:00

Moving Poems has put up another poem-film of mine. They've posted five of them now. If you haven't wasted an entire day watching 40 or 50 of the films from this site, maybe that should be your day tomorrow.

2010-12-06T23:32:00.000-08:00

Black Ocean editors and authors are picking out some good holiday break poetry reading for you over at the Black Ocean blog. I picked Ventrakl by Christian Hawkey.

2010-12-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

2010-12-03T10:17:00.000-08:00

According to Small Press Distribution's open house display, it looks like Scary, No Scary is #13 since August. It's had a good fall. If Oregon trips up against Oregon State this weekend, SNS might get a BCS bowl bid.

2010-11-29T10:21:00.000-08:00

They're on their ways.

2010-11-26T18:21:00.000-08:00

2010-11-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Octopus Books Fall 2010 Titles/2011-2012 Subscription Now Available

2010-11-21T12:10:00.000-08:00

Octopus Books is proud to announce the publication of the 5th and 6th full-length poetry titles in our catalog. Both books are now available for $12 (free shipping) on our website here.

Poems should go to where we think, which means that they often end up in the loneliest, most impossible places. (California'll do, but there are others.) Once, when I was a little kid, I burned my hand with our car's cigarette lighter while my mom was busy paying for the gas she'd just pumped. I remember the meaty stench, the little crop circle in my palm, but mostly I remember wanting badly to know a thing, a thing that sped off as quickly as it came, maybe quicker. Claire Becker's poems seem both driven by that impulse and in love with that result. They've got a throb at which it's hard not to wonder and, like more than one of us, an aching oddball soul—Graham Foust.

I can't remember when a book of poems has invited such an attentive reading as Cindy King's marvelous first volume, People are Tiny in Paintings of China. Each poem, a descent through shifting strata of syntax and history, requires a sustained renegotiation of one's balance in language and the world. As I read I had the feeling of launching myself from an opening line and falling past gorgeous and complex surfaces, an intricate landscape of experience, until landing on the solid earth of the final lines of these extraordinary poems. People are Tiny in Paintings of China is a work of uncommon talent—Lynn Emanuel.

Octopus Books is also offering another two-year subscription just in time for your online holiday gift purchasing session. The 2011-2012 subscription is now available on our website for $64 (shipping is always on us) and will include the following:

6 full-length titles including books by Heather Christle, Rebecca Farivar, Jenny Zhang, and Christopher DeWeese and 4 limited-edition chapbooks.

2010-11-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

"Playing back the events of a deep and ambiguous emotional moment, you realize you’ve irrevocably disturbed the sequence of what happened to the extent that cognizance frays at the edges and drifts away in pieces of microscopic phalanges in dark liquidy matter"

Ok, Goodnight gets eloquently reviewed by Luke Bloomfield in the new Noo.

2010-11-18T09:58:00.000-08:00

The time has come to jam with Stabotage.

2010-11-18T09:55:00.000-08:00

Some books I've blurbed recently. Some books you should read sometime soon, obviously.

Money Poems (Poor Claudia 2010) by James Gendron:

Gendron leans in like he's going to tell you a joke, but who knows what a joke is anymore? All I know is I want to die. And by that I mean I want to live. I mean, what choice do we have? The sky is speckled with motionless burning airplanes, and vomit hums deafeningly under the street. Let's write these smart absurd little poems on dollar bills until there are no more problems.

Try a Little Time Travel (Ugly Duckling 2010) by Natalie Lyalin:

Natalie Lyalin is writing some of the best poems in the world. There is an evil in her gorgeous poem-hearts. She must have sold her heart to the devil to write like this--so beautiful, so funny and so strange. Her images stack and stack down the page without spilling, each line such a bombshell you'll start reading backward to the first line. These poems are like babies--they will pop out of trees.

California (forthcoming from Four Way Books 2010) by Jennifer Denrow:

In Jennifer Denrow's California, California doesn't exist so it devastates us. It's like heaven that way: it's there just to remind us that we're already dead. In fact, very little is real in these obsessive poems--not the sky, not anything in it. We are just vowels amplified through a microphone full of throats.

Climate Reply (New Michigan Press 2010) by Trey Moody:

When I was a boy, I choked on a piece of candy outside the kitchen window for a few minutes while watching my parents making dinner. I thought I was going to die, but I didn't want to scare them. Our existence was so separate, a dying and a doing well, an outside and an inside. Trey Moody's poems hover in that cold, wet, refrigerator-lit place between the dying and the doing well, the outside and the inside. His poems are the thoughts of the person you love who is always standing behind you, slowly and silently suffocating. But they're not afraid to say hello, and please, and I'm scared.

*Kings of the F**king Sea* (forthcoming from Birds, LLC) by Dan Boehl:

I often have a difficult time distinguishing between the memories of my childhood nightmares, the movie Time Bandits, and now *Kings of the F**king Sea*. At the heart of each is an unrecoverable distance from home. In Dan Boehl's poems, the sea is not home. If we stay on it, we will eventually drown in it, but there is nothing we can do. His poems are unforgivably wise. Like the sea, they are an unafraid mirror. And though they remind us it's always too late--that our adventure is a constant failure--their beauty keeps us afloat for just long enough.

Ghost Machine (Caketrain 2010) by Ben Mirov:

Ben Mirov is the champion of the sentence. Every sentence is perfectly carved from a cold metal machine in the BART tunnels of Oakland that loops reality. They erase what they compress. I read this book and then puke in the shower. I read this book and then bleed on the sheets. My earlobes are wet. My pants are too small. These poems are about needing to touch something that you know your hand will go through. Mirov's poems are sick and crushing. This book marks the end of fucking around.

2010-11-16T23:38:00.000-08:00

2010-11-12T14:20:00.000-08:00

If you know Rebecca Hofrichter of Chicago, you should ask to see her new tattoo. It is an interpretation of an old poem of mine from The Man Suit called "The Center of Worthwhile Things." It was designed by Allie Sider. You should ask her to roll up her sleeves and recite this poem to you from memory while it stares at you. Black Ocean, does this qualify one for a lifetime subscription?

The Center of Worthwhile Things

I found her repeatedly jumping out of a large wooden wedding cake on the cliff overlooking the lake. She said she was obsessed with the idea: the surprise, the male fascination with sudden and bursting femininity, the pink tutu. I was walking away as a drunken avocado from that night’s costume party. I was paper-mache, chicken wire and green paint. It was 2 a.m. and there we were on that cliff: her, the center of a wedding cake, and me, the center of an avocado.

After she helped me out of my costume we sat there on the edge of the cliff, our legs pendulant. The lake was below us. We had nothing to say really. Her cake was on its side, lifeless. My avocado was on its side, a shell torn at the arm holes. When we made love I couldn’t help but think that we were just two passing invalids, both of us representing only the center of worthwhile things. It was easier for me to concentrate on the lake than her body, though they were both dark and looked like desert.

I remember when she tore that pink tutu from her waist as if it were some large production, as if some brass section somewhere, maybe down by the lake, should take notice and salute her suddenly exposed hips. It was a night of being backstage I thought, where nothing held its illusion, where everything was exposed as an actor.

2010-11-08T11:39:00.000-08:00

You love Pilot Books in Seattle. You love it because you love small press poetry. You want to give them some money so they can start a monthly poetry video series with an HD camera. There are hot stuff rewards in it for you.

2010-11-08T11:09:00.000-08:00

2010-11-05T14:22:00.000-07:00

2010-10-31T14:39:00.000-07:00

My good friend, Max Greenstreet, has made a lovely short film called My Own Eyes. It documents his 2009 road trip in support of his wife's, Kate Greenstreet, second book of poems, The Last 4 Things. It is structured around a series of 7 questions Max asks Kate about her poetry. Kate is one of my favorite contemporary poets, so it is a treat to hear her talk about her poems, but mostly, to me, this is a film about how to be insatiably curious about someone.

2010-10-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

I'm not really ready to tell you yet, and I don't think you're quite ready to hear about it. But soon, I will tell you about something that may have something to do with the Octopus Books catalog. In the mean time, keep doing your daily stretches.