Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia by Blake Butler

I cant talk like I wish possible about this book because it is that swirl of goodness prose that is hard for me to talk about--so dense, so far reaching, so relatable yet POW, so unrelentingly dark. I love it but sorry sorry here is a bit of the booyeah.

from The Uncontrollable Reflection

A night ruined of its silence might begin in any way. In fighting its own exit, on the pillow, my brain at night will cling to anything it can corral--however dumb or old or overreaching. The idle thought initiates itself. The feeling of the thought sometimes seems to spin or worm inside my forehead, or I might roll mnemonically inside it, as in a terrifying drunk. Then the first thought begets the second, following its sound. Usually the thought is not of something massive--the bigger worries of the day already so embedded they are as if part of the air--but instead the mind often comes to take hold of the smallest bolt or jut of time.

A Ballad for Metka Krasovec by Tomaž Šalamun

My first full book Šalamun experience and a good one full of soaring startles of language and an odd humor and images that sting. Beautiful balance of such things.

I don't like black cherries on the tree.
Who rubbed soot on the she bear?
A fetus, smashed jaw bone, part of the wind pipe missing.
I'd like to be rain, scrubbing the roof.
I'd like all my hair to burn, to be bare.
I died when I took my shoes off.
Ivy entwined me, like a castle.
Inside me there's still chalk,
outside a small yellow briefcase.
It dangles from my hand like a saint hanged
from a tree--the same cherry tree.

The Most of It by Mary Ruefle

Mary Ruefle has this baffling ability to get into human experience and give it a heartbeat, sincerely, rejuvenatingly (that's not a word?). She proves to capture a moment is one thing, to make it pulse is another thing entirely, extraordinarily.

From "A Half-Sketched Head"

Childhood Memories

There was a long silence during which he seemed to be struggling. Suddenly he looked up at her. "I wish to tell you as quickly as possible that when I was a boy it was my sole responsibility to feed the baby goats from a bottle containing their mother's milk. On one such occasion I managed to spill the goat's milk down my shirtfront--over which I should have been wearing a smock in the first place. And though I can't tell you why, I was wearing my best shirt: perhaps for the like of that alone I deserved to be punished. I went immediately to the washroom and began to rinse out the milk spots, using a large bar of my mother's soap, which was always in plentiful supply since she made it herself. And as I stood there it struck me--my mother's soap was goat's milk soap, with goat's milk I was trying desperately to erase goat's milk. That something could be its own remedy--though I did not then think in those terms--struck me as a rather serious joke. It was my first occasion of panic.

Some Thoughts About Ayiti by Roxane Gay

Ayiti by Roxane Gay, Artistically Declined Press.

I'm not sure there is much for my prose-weak mind to add about this book. It's been pointed at with lovingness (like this awesome nod ) and talked about by Roxane wonderfully (like here) and been opened up nicely in reviews (like this one by J.A. Tyler ). Yet, I still feel bad for not giving myself some record of why I loved this book.

- My digging of creative writing started as a way to run from the teenage junk I didn't understand, both in myself and around me. But now, as I'm fighting my lazy scared guts in order to become more "in-the-know" and "stable," creative writing is the expansive catalyst for this growth. Yeah, news is informative and talking to people is fun, but books and stories and poems that engage with those issues are teaching me more (about myself especially) than I think I initially wanted.

- Ayiti contains those smacking stories that teach and engage and force me to pay attention, don't allow me to be a wuss and "not care." (Or at least say I don't, because I do, but in my selfishness, I say this.)

- These are stories about the struggles of Haitians and how America affects them and how America's lens is dusty and how Haiti is a dangerous place with a gorgeous HUMAN soul.

- My favorite stories in the collection--"Motherfuckers," "About My Father's Accent," and "The Harder They Come"--were the ones that refused to let me NOT see myself in the Americans, to NOT deny that my worldview sucks and needs improving. More importantly, I think the clear, descriptive, and sometimes (emotionally/physically) brutal show that Roxane puts on in these story show so much of the ugly that it becomes clearer than ever to know how to be good.

- I used to think that Roxane's writing tried to tug at my heart strings, which it still might, but after reading this collection, I realize that these stories tug at all of me, WAKE UP.

Stevens And Ruefle Together

I read Selected Poems by Mary Ruefle and the essay "The Relations Between Poetry And Painting" by Wallace Stevens from his essay collection The Necessary Angel recently. I thought I'd place together some of my favorite quotes and see how they collide.

Speaking of Wordsworth's Michael and the line "And never lifted up a single stone" on pages 162/163, Stevens said: "One might say of a lazy workman, 'He's been out there, just loafing, for an hour and never lifted up a single stone,' and no one would htink this greaty poetry...These lines would have no existential value; they would simply call attention to the lazy workman. But the compositional use by Wordsworth of his line makes it something entirely different. These simple words become weighted with the tragedy of the old shepherd, and are saturated with poetry. Their referential importance is slight, for the importance of the action to which they refer is not in the action itself, but in the meaning; and that meaning is borne by the words. Therefore this is a line of great poetry."

From Ruefle's poem "Patient Without an Acre" on page 6:
I can't work, much less love.
Love, there's no mistaking the word
for it: once you've driven the
wild breath in, you'll have
a little glass hammer,
perfectly useless. This,
the flint of all things!

Speaking of the mind's retention of experience on pages 164/165, Stevens' says: "If it merely reconstructed the experience or repeated for us our sensations in the face of it, it would be the memory. What it really does is to use it as material with which it does whatever it wills. This is the typical function of the imagination which always makes use of the familiar to produce the unfamiliar."

From the beginning of Ruefle's "Perfect Reader" on page 63:
I spend all day in my office, reading a poem
by Stevens, pretending I wrote it myself,
which is what happens when someone is lonely
and decides to go shopping and meets another customer
and they buy the same thing. But I come to my senses,
and decide when Stevens wrote the poem he was thinking
of me, the way all my old lovers think of me
whenever they lift their kids or carry the trash,
and standing outside the store I think of them:

Discussing Simone Weil's thoughts on "decreation" on pages 174/175, Stevens says: "She says that decreation is making pass from the created to the uncreated, but that destruction is making pass from the created to nothingness. Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whichever field we discovered it, is that man's truth is the final resolution of everything."

Ruefle's poem "The Tragic Drama of Joy" on page 95:
Late that night it rained so hard the world
seemed flattened for good.
But the grocer knew the earth had a big gut
and could hold more than enough.
When he went out to receive a shipment of cat food
the stays of his umbrella were bent.
It took some time to fix them and when he got to his shop
the truck had already left.
On a whim he went inside and brought home
a bottle of wine for his wife.
Have you gone crazy? she said. They didn’t uncork it,
but he felt something nonetheless.
That wonderful click his umbrella had made
when it finally opened for good!

My Three Favorite Poems From Three Books I've Read Recently

From Repair by C.K. Williams, "Archetypes," for it's lovely (as Williams does so well in this book) use of the image as the track, the path, the road to navigate around human relationships and a sense of understanding our experience


From Jab by Mark Halliday, "Head Wound," for proving a poem about poetry doesn't have to be stuffy or boring, but can talk its way to the core of a life and shine from within (first and last stanza below):

On the day that my life span matched my mother's life span,
on the day when I had come to live as long as my mother lived--
she died in 1975, of cancer, three days after her fifty-second birthday--
on the day when I had lived as many days as she got to live
(though for her there were hundreds and hundreds of days of
miserable pain, which has not at all been my fate)--
on that day
I went to the gym to play basketball with some friends
.....................
Driving to the Emergency Rom I had seven thoughts:
1. It's a reminder.
2. It's a warning.
3. Let's not get carried away.
4. No wonder it is necessary and has always been necessary
to read poems and write the, to read novels and write them,
because the world is this enormous haunted cavern or enchanted gymnasium
filled, too filled with symbolic meanings ready at any moment
to spring forth like goblins and make anything significant.
5. I'm lucky, she wasn't lucky;
she wasn't lucky, I'm lucky, it doesn't mean
ANYTHING--
6. But even if it doesn't, I can still say
her bad luck was bad;
7. And if that's true, doesn't it follow
that my good luck is good?

From The New Year of Yellow by Matthew Lippman, "And Everywhere It's Florida," where Lippmann makes you listen, an odd charm he has, and you're not concerned with truth/falsity, but with the poem, that moment where you're finally listening:

What I did, I lied.
I lied about the Cremora Food Truck hijacked,
brought to Boston, blown up,
just to get all that white powder up in the air,
just to get all the kids to listen;

I lied about the money and the hungry zookeeper
who killed two giraffes with a bullhorn then wheeled out the Hibachi.

I lied about living rooms on fire
and dead cowboys on my lawn
who rode clean out of thin air
before I shot 'em with my six shooter,
cried Geronimo,
broke down in hives
and got lost in the Hollywood tumbleweed.
All my life it's been helicopter blades in my spine;
all my life I've lied.

BOOOKS

I haven't been happy with my reading lately, nor with my blogging, nor with my interacting with books. To fix that quickly, I'm gonna talk about a few books I've read in recent weeks:

Work's Tiring (from his Complete Poems 1930-1950 Disaffections) by Cesare Pavese

I'm not sure if I've ever read a book of poems like this before. So calm, so freshly narrative. Pavese knows what stories to tell, what images to show. Like in the following poem, "Ballet," where Pavese molds together the image of the giant and his various women, around them places the fight, the chaos of life. When the BOOYEAH image comes, in the final stanza below, I'm shaking my head as the poem ends, like I did with most of these poems, astounded not that I didn't see it coming (oh how warm I am, nuzzled along by Pavese's charm), but baffled by his vision, his shaping of the things I need to see.

Ballet (Read Whole Poem)

If the woman and the giant take off their clothes—
and later they will—the giant will resemble
the serenity of cliffs grown hot in the sun,
the girl-child pressing against them for warmth.

Thank You and Other Poems (from the Collected Poems) by Kenneth Koch

How did I make it this long without Koch? A huge influence of some of my favorite poets, like Dean Young, I'd only read some Koch in anthologies. I saw this collected poems at a Half Price Books and boy it must be fate or destiny or killer timing. Besides having a wonderful coverface to look at, the poems inside are majorly energetic. There's a sort of sense of enjoyment in life that I'm constantly looking for (both in living and in my poems) and Koch has painted a nice how-to guide. "To You" has shot straight up my FAVORITE POEMS OF ALL TIME list because it does that: finds the joy and splatters it on every wall. OH KOCH I'LL NEVER LET YOU GO.

To You (Read Whole Poem)

I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
Through which he saw her head, connecting with
Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
Roof in her heart.

Simple Machines by Michael Bible (Awesome Machine Press)

This might sound silly, but this book is a fabulous reminder of how letters (and sounds) combine to make words, words to make sentences. The sentence: a simple machine that can be so loud, can create so much. The sentences here don't have to add up to say something grand, though they might. For me, this reminder was enough: DON'T FORGET WHAT A SENTENCE CAN DO.

Praying Is boring.

The doctors think
everything is interesting.

The Voice Of The Poet (audiocassette and book) by W.H. Auden

Todd gave me this thing and I listened/read along to each side on its own night. After school, I'd come home, hop in some gym shorts, and plop on my bed and listen to Auden say his goodness. I'm glad I didn't tackle a lot of Auden a few years ago, because my silliness would have got caught up in his rhyming, his "oldness." Now, I see that he's as fresh as the day he wrote those poems. Go read from "In Time Of War"and tell me I'm wrong.

A Coney Island Of The Mind by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

This one got read in a treestand, opening day of bowhunting 2011. Weird right? Five deer probably walked by me and I didn't look up. I didn't care. My goal was rereading this powerful book in its entirety. Speaking of lists earlier, I'd probably put this as top 10 poetry books of all-time for me. I'm amazed by how Ferlinghetti can holler without seeming whiny, can philosophize without being preachy, can slam it out without being attacking.

1 (Click Here For Whole Poem)
In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
the people of the world
exactly at the moment when
they first attained the title of
‘suffering humanity’
They writhe upon the page
in a veritable rage
of adversity
Heaped up
groaning with babies and bayonets
under cement skies
in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
bent statues bats wings and beaks
slippery gibbets
cadavers and carnivorous cocks
and all the final hollering monsters
of the
‘imagination of disaster’
they are so bloody real
it is as if they really still existed

Some stuff I've read recently.

I always think those book round-ups, where people talk about their experience reading several books they've read recently, are really awesome. Recent example: Roxane Gay over at HTMLGIANT.

Here's some stuff from my head:
- For All These Wretched, Beautiful, & Insignificant Things So Uselessly and Carelessly Destroyed... by Hosho McCreesh: Check out my single-sentence review over at Vouched.

- Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot: Sometimes, I get so wrapped up in contemporary and indie lit stuff that I forget about the goodness of people like Eliot. As I'm becoming more and more interested in long poems (somehow; I was always trying to find ways to not extend my poems beyond a page), this book was just what I need. Thoughtful meditation and sincere beliefs. I loved how this series took itself seriously in a way that some poetry today is afraid to. Eliot trudges forward unafraid of the big boys, the tough topics like life and death, time, and religion. Along similar lines of "The Wasteland," Eliot isn't afraid to risk torturing his readers by unleashing the torturing inside himself, through style and voice shifts. The thing I enjoyed most about this book was its sense of self, its fearlessness in searching for answers.

from "East Coker"
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

- The July/August issue of The American Poetry Review: Though they've been really awful at getting me my issues (missed two of the four in my subscription so far), I do enjoy APR when I get it. This issue especially had me stoked because it was packed with people I like. Like 8 (yes EIGHT) new poems by Bob Hicok, along with an interview with him and a short essay about him). Like essays by Tony Hoagland and David Rivard. Like an interview with John Ashbery. I love how APR is unafraid to dedicate so much space to someone like Hicok with such a long selection of new poems. Obviously, it is risky because if the poems prove unpopular with a reader, there's a good amount of space taken up. Of course, I dug these poems; Hicok making further strides with the music of his poems, quirky meandering poems that breath out very well. Cynthia Cruz has a set of self-portraits in the issue that are impressive. Where the self-portrait often wants to expand and project, these poems use fragmentation that makes the self-portrait fresh, even non-self-focused. Overall, an issue full of more than great poems, but great thoughts about poems and great depth in engaging with poets.

from "Stop-loss" by Bob Hicok

The man beside you in fatigues, camouflaged
from Wednesday, holding his son’s hand
for the last time before he returns
to shooting at people, being shot at

in a war he thought he was done with,
I mean him: he wants to stop loss.
What a beautiful phrase for the army
to support. In it, I hear

that we’re through with grenades,
the violent enterprise of steel,
we’re on to the new war, the war against
the cannibalism of war.

- Skirmish by Dobby Gibson : Because this is the kind of poetry that I gravitate towards (white guy, discursive, associative, self-focused), I have to be careful not to read too much of it too often (read: trying to expand my range). After reading and falling in love with Matthew Zapruder's poem "Dobby's Sweatshirt," I've been itching to read this book. Amongst the stress of moving, I decided to console myself a little with this book. Overall, it's exactly what I expected. I don't know if that's a great thing or not. My favorite poems were the ones all titled "Fortune." Different than the typical style of one-two page poems, these only lasted a dozen or so lines playing strongly off the ideas of fortune and chance. I love how contemplative and thoughtful (kind of like the Eliot pieces) this series is; they piece various examples together in a way that equals an unstated fortune. The book as a whole didn't cure me, but it was a charming read that nursed me out of my stress zone.

Fortune (from H_NGM_N)

An iceberg calves and drifts
its first few feet toward destruction.
The motel hallway carpeting just goes on and on.
A cigarette is flicked from a speeding car,
a farmer files his horse’s teeth—
how is it that we can ever fall asleep?
There’s an infinity inside even
the shortest storms of our seen lives.
A Finn ladles water in his sauna.
He’s never met you, and that is why
he has to make himself feel better
by going someplace very small to be warm and alone.

I WENT TO ALABAMA AND ALL I GOT WAS SLASHED

Since I am the last of the group to post about this trip, what can I say much original? NOTHING. Here is a list of really cool things I remember from the student exchange trip to Alabama and the Slash Pine Festival:

Some seriousgood reading time in the van: all of When All Our Days Are Numbered Marching Bands Will Fill The Streets & We Will Not Hear Them Because We Will Be Upstairs In The Clouds by Sasha Fletcher and Smiles of the Unstoppable by Jason Bredle, as well as parts of books by Tim O'Brien, Chuck Klosterman, Bob Hicok, and the April issue of Poetry Magazine.

Something like 6 (OKAY OKAY I SKIPPED ONE) readings featuring 50+ readers in two days. People say, MAN I WOULD HATE POETRY and I shook in my poetry shoes (boating loafers?), but smooth execution Slash Pine people. Nice work.

Meeting and seeing my online pal Brandi Wells read. We had matching black tank tops and we didn't plan it. She apparently doesn't like dudes in tank tops. I'm a dude in a tank top. We didn't fight. She was like, I WAS NERVOUS and I'm like, YOU RULED.

Seeing cool people like Oliver de la Paz (his new book was sold out :( ), Christopher DeWeese (THIS GUY IS FUNNY IN A GOOD I KNOW WHAT I AM DOING WAY), Brian Barker (PERSONA POEM WITH GORBACHEV), and Amber Nelson (NICE FEELING OF THE WEEKEND: She is the Alice Blue editor and said, You're Tyler Gobble, and I said, I guess I am. She said, I liked your submission. I said, thank you.) read.

Watching my fellow trippers rip it up and stuff. Jeremy brought THE BEERS in a way I can't rip it off the page. Elysia said something silly about wearing cowboy boots because she's in the south, and people liked her poem that started, I WANNA FORCE FEED YOU A PIGEON or something like that. Layne was loud and people want to be here when they grow up. The cursing/vulgarity score was like BSU 19 Others 0.

Meeting some sweet new people like Parker, Shea, and Stacy.

Seeing the always awesome Brian Oliu. This guy does the robot to Salsa music, writes awesome lyric essays, has a voice like I SUPPORT YOU, and was woahelpful in getting us to the fun and goodness of the town.

BREAKFAST. FREE AT THE HOTEL. First day: turkey sausage and cheese omelets. And they didn't suck. Also, donuts and apple juice. Also, mints. Last day: french toast and sausage patties. THANX HAMPTON IN. Oh yeah: Cookies and milk FOR FREE every night.

My reading was a little jumbled. I got nervous and the cool outside air shook up my contacts. But I recovered when I read On Friendship and people didn't go GROSSSSSSSS. Nice folks wanted to know me or say good job or just hug me drunkenly in a bar. Sounds good to me. I said, TYLER GOBBLE, a lot.

TANK TOPS. Beautiful weather/beautiful campus. Layne was good company lotz. We have similar goals in life and on the trip and with each other and with poetry and etc. etc. etc. WE ARE ADVENTUROUS.

DANCIN' was pretty awesome. One of the readers on Friday dj'ed at this nice little bar called The Green Bar, so Layne and I boogied down with Oliu, Parker, and others. YES.

Tuscaloosa's disc golf course whooped me, smacking my disc into creeks and shrubbery and snakepits. I hit more trees than chains. Cool seeing Lovelace tear it up and hearing his stories about his early days as a golfer there.

Overall, I'm so stoked to have these memories wiggling in my brain. Thanks people who helped like donating money like dancing with me like asking me to go like keeping me from being lonely down south like setting me next to booze like clapping and laughing at my poems like saying GOOD JOB and YOU MATTER A LITTLE. That's all I can ask for and you ruled it.

Read Lovelace, Elysia, Layne, and Jeremy's accounts of the trip.

What I Read In 2010 (To The Best of My Memory and Goodreads)

Jelly Roll: A Blues by Kevin Young
Kisses: A Collection of Poems by Steven Orlen
Beloved Infidel: Poems by Dean Young
Connecting the Dots: Poems by Maxine Kumin
All My Poems by Nate Pritts
Keyhole Issue 9
The New Year of Yellow: Poems by Matthew Lippman
More Perfect Depictions of Noise by Justin Taylor
Word of Mouth: Poems Featured on NPR's All Things Considered ed. by Catherine Bowman
FEELINGS, Assoc. by Matt Hart and Nate Pritts
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
WE WERE ETERNAL AND GIGANTIC by Evelyn Hampton
45 Mercy Street by Anne Sexton
Words for Empty and Words for Full by Bob Hicok
Down Spooky: Poems by Shanna Compton
Wolf Face by Matt Hart
Orange Juice and Other Stories by Timothy Willis Sanders
Five Decades: Poems 1925-1970 by Pablo Neruda
The Widening Spell of the Leaves by Larry Levis
Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! by Peter Davis
We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough by Mike Young
Vanishing Point: Not a Memoir by Ander Monson
The Jackalope Wars by Jeremy Bauer
Actual Air by David Berman
The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox
Saying the World by Peter Periera
A Gringo Like Me: Poems by Jennifer L. Knox
Scorch Atlas by Blake Butler
The Sonnets by Ted Berrigan
The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction: 50 North American Short Stories Since 1970
The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present by Phillip Lopate
The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative by Vivian Gornick
A Season in Hell and The Drunken Boat by Arthur Rimbaud
Halls of Fame: Essays by John D'Agata
Embryoyo: New Poems by Dean Young
Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides by Stephen Dobyns
What We Carry by Dorianne Laux
Walking the Black Cat by Charles Simic
A New Path to the Waterfall by Raymond Carver
First Course In Turbulence by Dean Young
MC Oroville's Answering Machine by Mike Young
Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke
Collected Poems of Marianne Moore
Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems by Durs Grünbein
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments by DFW
The Feeling is Mutual by Washtenaw County Women's Poetry Collective and Casserole Society
31 Poems, 1988-2008, by Dean Young
The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, of Elizabeth Bishop
The Art of Recklessness: Poetry as Assertive Force and Contradiction by Dean Young
The Available World: Poems by Ander Monson
Red Sauce, Whiskey & Snow: Poems by August Kleinzahler,
Various Issues of Poetry and American Poetry Review
The Back Country by Gary Snyder
High Water Mark: Prose Poems by David Shumate
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Homage to the Last Avant-Garde by Kent Johnson
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: Poems by John Ashbery
The Best of (What's Left of) Heaven by Mairead Byrne
Poetry and the Age by Randall Jarrell
Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson
The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck
Glass, Irony and God by Anne Carson
Sententia #1
How They Were Found by Matt Bell
Rapture by Susan Mitchell
Blood Dazzler by Patricia Smith
Selected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
What the Living Do: Poems by Marie Howe
Adam Robison and Other Poems by Adam Robinson
Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell
The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Vol. 1: 1909-1939
Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
Sweet Ruin by Tony Hoagland
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories ed. by Ben Marcus
Poemland by Chelsey Minnis
A Little White Shadow by Mary Ruefle
Selected Odes of Pablo Neruda
Another Republic: 17 European and South American Writers, edited by Simic and Strand
Ararat by Louise Gluck
A Coney Island of the Mind: Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
The Descent of Alette by Alice Notley
Selected Poems of Czelaw Milosz
Lucky Life by Gerald Stern
The Selected Poems of Federico Garcia Lorca
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair by Pablo Neruda
Say, Poem by Adam Robinson
Descriptive Sketches by Nate Pritts
Allegory of the Supermarket by Stephanie Brown
Then, Suddenly by Lynn Emanuel
Selected Poems of W.S. Merwin
Strike Anywhere by Dean Young
I Am Going to Clone Myself Then Kill the Clone and Eat It by Sam Pink
Little Star: Poems by Mark Halliday
The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992 by Jack Gilbert
All-American Poem by Matthew Dickman
Selected Poems of Frank O'Hara
Dutchman and The Slave: Two Plays by Amiri Baraka,
The Rocket's Red Glare by David Peak
Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs,
Artifice 1 and 2
No Colony 01
Oh Baby by Kim Chinquee
How I Became Hettie Jones by Hettie Jones
Almost No Memory: Stories by Lydia Davis
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Haywire: Poems by George Bilgere
Vacationland by Ander Monson
Wolf Parts by Matt Bell
EVER by Blake Butler
What Narcissism Means to Me by Tony Hoagland
typewriter by Jimmy Chen
think tank for human beings in general by Jordan Castro
I Am In The Air Right Now by Kathryn Regina
Inconceivable Wilson by J.A. Tyler
cooling board: a long playing poem by Mitchell Douglas, Mitchell
Best Words, Best Order: Essays on Poetry by Stephen Dobyns
Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft by Tony Hoagland
Troia: Mexican Memoirs by Bonnie Bremser
Velocities by Stephen Dobyns
Satan Says by Sharon Olds
Ultimate Blogs: Masterworks from the Wild Web by Sarah Boxer
Queer: A Novel by William S. Burroughs
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Facts About the Moon: Poems by Dorianne Laux
Flaming Iguanas: An Illustrated All-Girl Road Novel Thing by Erika Lopez
During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present by Brandon Scott Gorrell
Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide by Henry Jenkins
The Trouble with Poetry: And Other Poems by Billy Collins
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Best American Poetry 2007 by Heather McHugh
Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation by Ray Bradbury,
Overheard in New York UPDATED: Conversations from the Streets, Stores, and Subways by S. Morgan Friedman,
Casual Glory; or, Macaulay Culkin Does Nothing by Shaun Gannon
Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris
Published & Perished: Memoria, Eulogies, & Rememberences of American Writers by Steven Cilbar
east central Indiana (ebook) by Daniel Bailey
The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey
What Nature: Poems by Steve Fay
Poetry In Person ed. by Alexander Neubauer
10 of Diagrams
Agriculture Reader Issue 3
Copper Nickel Issue 13
The Broken Plate 2010
Hayden’s Ferry Review Issue 46
New Madrid Journal Summer 2007
Various issues of my favorite online journals like The Collagist, Lamination Colony, elimae, Diagram, Spooky Boyfriend, Metazen, Everyday Genius, decomP, Shampoo, H_NGM_N, Mad Swirl, No Tell Motel, Robot Melon, Smalldoggies Magazine

LETS TALK ABOUT THIS LIST.