AM I THE MEAT????????????

She might be the babe beside me, but she's also one mighty terrific poet. I mean, Layne Ransom. Before the girlfriend was the best pal and the coworker and the classmate and the girl at the martini bar shouting about slugs. I'm here about her new (first! congrats! yes!) chapbook from H_NGM_N Books called You Are The Meat. Sure sure I could be risking an elbow (or worse!) saying anything sillybad about this book, but mainly I'd just be sillywrong. I'm being srsly(asmuchasispossible)honest here!

Here I go. Here I go. Boyfriend and poetry fan and Layne fan and superpal all chattering as one messy flung ball. First thing you gotta notice, first poem, first ending, first time you get to take a breath and scroll on: "Don’t reason/with a plane crash/clean up the fucking bodies." Layne is scared, but isn't scared to shout out of these poems, EVERYTHING SHE SEES. It's beautiful and daring and feels like late night walks we take. A little drunk and a little worried and a lot in awe of the Past, Present, and Future. "When will Jesus Christ fulfill my sexual desires?" That's life, right? Waiting for saviors, and getting stood up by saviors, and (failing at) being our own saviors, and realizing our saviors were here the whole fucking time, in a homemade hat holding a chocolate bar. "If I could slap a title on this moment/it’d be EVERYONE I LOVE IS HERE" This thing is full of good titles ("How Was Your Day?" and "Little Methods" to name TWO) and good lines (you get it yet?), but most WOW is the straight up stumbling-down-the-railroad-tracks oomph of these poems, this whole meatwad. It goes zoom: "then my eyes explode/out of my skull with blood and multi-colored/magnet letters spelling words like “faith,”/“love,” and “beauty.”/you rearrange them into phrases like/“you evil fatty” and “voila, beef hat!” But golly geesh golly, what reminders we get throughout, of being loved/possessed, "If I could take you where I’m going/I would take you," of the way it is (but keep going!), "If I ruled the world, everything/would turn out just as awful," of The Necessary Parts, "Your first something is holy. Have a sandwich. Keep moving constantly, firing and firing out."

The Fullness of Everything

So stoked that my chapbook, Goodness is a Fine Thing to Chase, is being released by Tiny Hardcore Press in an anthology featuring a chap of rad stories by Christopher Newgent and a chap of awesome lyric essays by Brian Oliu. The book drops in April but you can preorder it now. Looking at that page over and over throughout today has me still shockedhonoredsmileecstatic. Big woots to those two dudes for letting my words hang beside theirs. Big thanks to Roxane Gay for believing in us.

MORE INFO HERE

HOT DAMN PEOPLE I KNOW ARE GOOD

Super pal Layne has a piece in the new decomP. YOUCH THIS THING SHREDS. Even better: you can listen to Layne's nice voice speaketh it, if you want. SERIOUSLY SMOOTH MOVE PUBLISHING THIS.

Richard Chiem has a flash piece up there too and man, I love how the mind is captured there, the way he entertains the thoughts on the page.

Oh yeah, I have a poem there too. My voice is there too, but it's kind of weirdo-ish.

Wonderfort is looking way sweet, and Roxane Gay's piece is one big HELL YEAH. I love when brothel's matter.

GETTIN SPOOKY

I'm super stoked that my poem, "Humble Endings," has found a home in the new issue of Spooky Boyfriend alongside awesome poets like my friend Shaun Gannon.

The Jackalope Wars by Jeremy Bauer

I am stoked to announce the completion of a project I spent the summer working on: the debut chapbook of Jeremy Bauer.

This chapbook is the first release for Stoked Press. Jeremy Bauer has captured the words that were fighting their wars in space. Now, here they are in poem form, contained but still fighting, alive and kicking. CHECK IT OUT ON GOODREADS.

Some cool poet dudes wrote blurbs:

The poems in The Jackalope Wars are sort of violent, sort of sweet, and completely kick ass. I like Jermey Bauer’s words a lot. He presents a little corner of Hope in a big room of Hell. I want to quote a line from the book, but I keep getting distracted by other lines. Like how he writes: “Oh Baby, we are The Murder!” And I feel like, "Yeah, I hear you."

-Peter Davis, author of Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! and Hitler’s Mustache

In Jeremy Bauer's The Jackalope Wars, creation is an event that is still happening all over us. And as the Gods continue shifting our atoms, the only response is war. William Carlos Williams said that "a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words." Well, these poems are robots that have turned on the master in the sky. There is fire and blood and now my eyes contain lasers like swirling multitudes. These poems are large and they will eat you.

-Daniel Bailey, author of The Drunk Sonnets

Jeremy is a good friend of mine, and I'm real stoked to see his poems see the world on paper this way. I've been wanting to put out a chapbook for awhile, and to have Jeremy's be my first, DAG YES.

The official release is next Tuesday, and they will be selling for four bucks. If anyone is interested in purchasing one, let me know.

Here is a poem to convince you:

Divine Dog Heads

My hurricane is naked
dripping with birds
soggy with birds
Teaming with white-as-angel’s-blood
gulls

Crying ‘cause they’re hungry
Hungry for french-fried dreams
and salted maritime varietals

They’re dipshits
Their hobbled calls for the true gleam
that envelops with radiant, slobbering
energy but hovers beyond
any manner of vision or scope
or material real

They fly with the dog heads
Heads of wisdom and divine luminescence
But they’re all bleeding and old
Wrinkled, tired muzzles
Tinged with gray and white and lost love

Their beaks hardly open, they creak
like decrepit doors ready to
fall from the hinges

He has been unable to tell the truth ever since.

Six-hundred pounds and eleven feet between them,
the couple holds plastic sacks from the grocer downtown.
I've been pounding the sidewalk, moving fast, trying
to kill time. They appear, bouncing from right foot
to left, shifting the mass of their hips-- those spare tires--
made only for a semi-truck on a long, long road,

the plastic strips in lieu of handles digging
into the dense fingers of the husband while
the wife carries only two, both on her right hand.
It continues for blocks, the struggle, protrusions
a foot from their bellies, those bellies!

- from "Moderation" by Ryan Rader (at The Blue Route)

I wore those pants in the snow,
My treaded boots displacing powder

like dust in the expanding universe,
Ankles kept safe in white socks,

the weather speaking in waves.
I remember six distinct summers

of you, the wild dancers,
Punk-hipster art-fag fashion-

-istas, mosh-pit, kickflipping
crowd-surfing social butterflies.

- from "For The Girls By The Drained Pool" by Ryan Rader (also at The Blue Route)

Congratulations to my friend Ryan on this publication.