I would so love love love to make an indie lit boy pin-up calendar. This is one of those ideas I come up with on the elliptical machine that ends up diverting my remaining free time (like, none) and creativity from poetry to publicity.
So I am not going to do it. I don’t think I am going to do it.
Also, I am not going to tell you who I really want to see on that calendar.
The lovely Nicelle Davis over at The Bees Knees turned the boys and me into Ampersand literary superheros! Tres cool.
Melissa Broder
The Gefilte Fisherwoman
Adam Gallari
Post Romantic Man
Jesse Bradley
The Rakish Hobbit
Fighting Nicholas Sparks!
Ridding the world of unnecessary adjectives…
What up yo?
Oh, me. Not much. Just blogging when I’m supposed to be writing poetry. Like, all the feckin’ time. When I die, my literary estate is going to consist of blog posts.
Here’s are some recent greatest hits from the succubus:
Letters To a Young Poet. From a publicist. new!
Open letter to the significant other of an author with a first book coming out from an indie press.
The groupie’s guide to the galaxy.
How (not) to run a reading series. *poached from this blog…now with more content!
Vice DOs and DON’Ts: dead poets edition.
What not to include in your lit mag submission letter.
I consider it a luxury to work in an office with a door that closes. A brief look into the history of my employment may reveal why.
My first job out of college was as a canvasser for CALPIRG. I was the one with the the clipboard and the “rap” about old growth forest. You shut the door on me. Nader’s little sweatshop kept me fed for four months; if people asked what I did, I told them I was an Activist.
None of my early 20′s jobs–pizza delivery girl, Peachy Puff, waitress at “horror” theme restaurant Jekyll and Hyde (they still owe me $200 from a shift serving Mummy Burgers to 50 Down Syndrome children on Christmas)–could ever compare to my second job after college.
When I was 22, I spent a year working as a Secretary for a Tantric sexuality non-profit (yes) in Marin County, California (where else?) called Celebrations of Love. Please. See for yourself. This woman was my boss.
There’s this:
Reading tomorrow night w/ Joshua Cohen, Jason Diamond and Fiona Maazel at Candlestick at Pete’s Candy Store at 7 PM.
And there’s this:
A poem by David Berman (of Silver Jews) from Actual Air.
Governors On Sominex
It had been four days of no weather as if nature had conceded its genius to the indoors.
They’d closed down the Bureau of Sad Endings and my wife sat on the couch and read the paper out loud.
The evening edition carried the magic death of a child backlit by a construction site sunrise on its front page.
I kept my back to her and fingered the items on the mantle.
Souvenirs only reminded you of buying them.
* * *
The moon hung solid over the boarded-up Hobby Shop.
P.K. was in the precinct house, using his one phone call to dedicate a song to Tammy, for she was the light by which he traveled into this and that
And out in the city, out in the wide readership, his younger brother was kicking an ice bucket in the woods behind the Marriott,
his younger brother who was missing that part of the brain that allows you to make out with your pillow.
Poor kid.
It was the light in things that made them last.
* * *
Tammy called her caseworker from a closed gas station to relay ideas unaligned with the world we loved.
The tall grass bent in the wind like tachometer needles and he told her to hang in there, slowly repeating the number of the Job Info Line.
She hung up and glared at the Killbuck Sweet Shoppe. The words that had been running through her head, ”employees must wash hands before returning to work,” kept repeating and the sky looked dead.
* * *
Hedges formed the long limousine a Tampa sky could die behind. A sailor stood on the wharf with a clipper ship reflected on the skin of the bell pepper he held.
He’d had mouthwash at the inn and could still feel the ice blue carbon pinwheels spinning in his mouth.
There were no new ways to understand the world, only new days to set our understandings against.
Through the lanes came virgins in tennis shoes, their hair shining like videotape,
singing us into a kind of sleep we hadn’t tried yet.
Each page was a new chance to understand the last.
And somehow the sea was always there to make you feel stupid.
"The whole book pumps, and I swear some of what’s coming in and out are flashes of light that you can read it by."
–Mark Bibbins
"…a book of poems that is at once apocalyptic, full of sorrow, and packed with images crystalline in their beauty and truth… This book is full of magic."
–Dorothea Lasky
"To read Meat Heart is to consume, perish, murder, glitter, and prophesize. To say that Broder is fearless is not saying enough."
–Natalie Lyalin
Buy from SPD
Personalized by me
Or Amazon
“This debut from Broder is as funny and hip as it is disturbing… a bright and unusual debut.”
–Publishers Weekly
"…obsessive, energetic and pop-culture-infused poetry…"
–Time Out New York
"Broder’s insight and honesty will make your brain light up and your hair stand on end.”
–The San Francisco Examiner
"Broder’s verse is acrobatic and whip-smart… its own creature."
–Bomb
