I recently adopted this little guy through World Vision. I am very excited about my new little friend and hoping that my measly sponsorship dollars are blessed and stretched to their maximum potential. I want this boy fed and educated at the end of every day.

Nothing would make me happier than to go to this parking lot,  grab him up in my arms, and bring him home, but I guess for now, letters and tiny care packages will have to do. Please  keep in mind that thousands of other beautiful skinny boys in pink bunny ears sprawled supine in a parking lot are still waiting to be adopted. Hallelujah!


Mama Cass climbs a red rope liquorice into the arms of St Teresa who dreamt it all on a bus to Des Moines.

I am trapped under a god-size hair dryer with every woman ever wondering how to love each other.

I ate a candy necklace dipped in brill cream off the neck of an emo buddhist and he blessed me.

I talked about making out with readers in the L magazine.

I am playing spin the bottle with 3 failed memes and a feminine archetype.

The perfect storm of synapses is invite-only.

I talked to JA Tyler about abyssness, moreness and not-enoughness.

I will follow friday into a forest of twizzlers.


A human, we’ll call him Mickey Dolenz, emailed me this:

You Are Very Aware
YAVA.
And I wonder what your belief system is.
Not limited to the societal understanding of belief system.
Life after death?
Do you belief in A God. Or Gods. Or the universe as a being attempting to understand itself?
Quantum physics? Entanglement?
YAVA, and I feel you have sat and astral projected beyond yourself, or have experienced… things one may call “supernatural” (ie, prophetic dreams, instinctual knowings, etc).
No?

I wrote this back:

I believe in a god I don’t understand. The relationship changes every day. Some moments I am an active participant. Other times (most times) I take my will back entirely. Faith is a muscle I work b/c I have to in order to stay alive [and have some shot at serenity]. It’s one area I don’t analyze b/c I cannot afford to. I don’t have any one religion or belief-system but there are wonderful people who have helped me along the way and continue to help me–an American religion if you will. And yes, I’ve had peak experiences and cosmic experiences. But the most lasting spiritual experiences, and the ones I’ve integrated and continue to integrate best, are of the slower, less flashy variety.



PUBLISHERS WEEKLY SAYS THIS ABOUT MEAT HEART:

…Broder’s second collection cranks up the weird by mining the grotesqueries of her speakers’ relationships with men, god, the self, and food. That these elements often become indistinguishable–as in “Ciao Manhattan,” where “It is so god/ When the voice is like wheat// Spooned wheat/ In whole milk”–is evidence of Broder’s talent for showing us our contemporary conflict: god is both a haven from the grotesque and the name we rail against when we aren’t safe from it. But Broder is smarter than to suggest that there are only two sides to this dilemma. Out to “crucify boredom,” her poems show us how any relationship with the divine is no less at risk of engendering grotesque lust. “Yesterday the worship rattled like an engine,” she writes, and “God keeps unfurling me/ with god’s gigantic helium.” What makes Broder such a pleasure on the page is her insistence that these dramas play out on a workaday stage infused with surreal Pop and imaginative muscle. “When the last Beatle dies,” she tells us in “Ringo,” “the president hits a kill switch/ and all our possessions/ drift like eyelashes/ through a crack in the sky.” In Broder’s hands, it’s good to kiss them good-bye.

RYAN BRITT TALKS ABOUT MEAT HEART IN THE CONTEXT OF SCIENCE FICTION AT TOR.COM


1862 was a big year for Emily Dickinson.

In 1862 she wrote 227 poems.

In 1862 she wrote my fave dark ones like I felt a funeral. I felt a cleaving in my mind was 1864.

What happened to Em’s head prior to 1862 that triggered this hyperconsciousness and/or psychic fracture and/or breakdown and/or awakening to the strangeness of existence and/and brilliance? Austin married Sue in 1856. Charles came to say goodbye in 1861.

If there was a triggering experience, or set of them, the experience seems scary.

I identify with the feelings.

That is why I am still talking about her.

WORD BANK COMPRISED OF NOUNS THEFTED FROM EMILY DICKINSON’S 1862 FASCICLES, WHICH I WILL USE TO WRITE A POEM

roses air sting medicine grave narcotic balm clock fingers goblin bomb quartz arctic tongue cheek benefactor feathers atom halves toys core blood spur wilderness art comrades dread horses builder cedars paradise music bars species midnight hint shelf road grave velvet needles field crumb ocean angle rainbow heads wine wharf frame nerve frost farmers vision light telescope door mountain prism glass brow pools grimace limb deity darkness bite hemisphere bread despair brain stone hum strains antelope apron


My poem, Mercy, is poem of the week at The Missouri Review.

Feel legit.

Feel like a boss.

Two new poems in NAP involving god & vomit, as per usual. Rob MacDonald has neat poems in the issue as well.


At the end of my suffering there was a skymall.

At the end of my suffering there was a hammacher schlemmer sheepskin slipper.

At the end of my suffering there was an ionic cleansing facial steamer.

At the end of my suffering there was a password vault.

At the end of my suffering there was a cordless slide and negative to digital picture converter.

At the end of my suffering there was an illimicube.

At the end of my suffering there was a grand-scale lioness statue.

At the end of my suffering there was an air mouse elite.

At the end of my suffering there was a bigfoot garden yeti.

At the end of my suffering there was a peeing boy of brussels fountain.

At the end of my suffering there was a comfy control panty shaper.

At the end of my suffering there was a sodastream.

At the end of my suffering there was a videoscreen microscope.

At the end of my suffering there was a citrine cocktail sparkle ring.

At the end of my suffering there was a food pillow.

At the end of my suffering there was a faceless watch.


I will be doing more poetry readings

in the next 3 months than should

be allowed on this blue planet.

I will put a padlock on your tongue

and a pyramid in your earhole.

The pyramid double as an aid,

lets my air in, my devils. Shut up.

Blurb me with ferocious violence

or go eat a mango (but you can’t

say mango in a poem anymore

if you ever could). I am going

to read slow and low and you will

love  it. I will carve out your eyes

like a jack-o-lantern so there are

3 hostages instead of only 1 hostage.

No, a jack is not a fit.

Jacks die.


I want to surrender to god’s will 4evs.

It doesn’t seem fair that you can’t get hypnotized and that’s it.

It’s so uncool to have to surrender again every minute.

Why would I define god?

What kind of mystery is that?

Even when I don’t feel it there’s the experience of having felt it.

“Proving” god seems stupid.

Keep cleaning keep cleaning keep cleaning.

God feels me.


 

Pascal was right when he said that humans don’t wanna do anything unless they can tell others about it.

He didn’t even have an internet.

I want peace. But more than peace I want attention. I always think the adrenaline of attention will bring me peace.

Say to yourself  “you owe it to the world to make art” and then start laughing.

I want my life to be a signifier of awesome.

I am writing intricate narratives of cute boys without their authorization.

I am naming my winter coat The International House of Adrenaline.


MEAT HEART IS AVAIL FOR PREORDER

AND

TODAY IS SEVEN YEARS
(some of you know
what that means)

AND

THE EGO IS A DESERT

AND

IT DRIES AND DRIES

BUT

SOME THINGS NEVER DRY

LIKE

_ _ _’S LOVE

AND

I AM SO GRATEFUL



read the awesomest three books this year and we’re only three weeks into 2012–

Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines

A Sport and a Pastime by James Salter

The Book of Frank by CA Conrad

feel like a lucky girl to be alive and have all this at my fingertips.

they are in my bones now.

the Salter is the perfect book for me at 32, a fantasist, a little afraid of the reaches of my fantasy-life, a lot afraid, fearing aging, thinking of boys and trying to hitch back onto adolescence. this is the book of the buggering in the bum. it is aesthetic bliss. a tiny realist in me was like “doesn’t Ann Marie Costellot ever have a dirty bum?” but the realist was eclipsed by the love and breath and mystery in Salter’s craftsmanship. what a pleasure this book. the most beautiful.

all i can say about Reines is that she is in me now like a hot virus and i am smitten. my friend Kristen Iskandrian says i have the fever and she knows it well. i just ordered The Cow. excited.

the Conrad book is full of exciting language that knocks and kicks — really sad and melty and strange and funny in exactly the way that life is, you know?

the Reines and the Conrad make me excited about what a book-length collection can be.

a poem shaped like a book.

a book shaped like a poem.


 

I “co-created” a yellow cake with Duncan Hines. You can too.  Here’s how:

1. Go to the store and buy the shit.
2. Mix all the shit together.
3. Put the shit in the oven.
4. Take the shit out of the oven.
5. Let the shit cool.
6. Ice the shit.
7. Eat the shit.


I DON’T THINK I WILL EVER BE RELEVANT & IF THIS BLOG WAS A TUMBLR I’D POST 3 THINGS

1.  TIBETAN BOOK OF THE GRECIAN ARROW POEM

2.

3. CRUSTYPUNKS


NICE THINGS POETS SAY ABOUT MEAT HEART!!!

Don’t believe Melissa Broder when she writes, “I’m afraid / to say anything with heart.” This book is not afraid, as she proves right away and on every page, and that’s why we needed her to make it. A little dark, a little damaged, a little deranged, but definitely not afraid—and never short on the titular organ, which also acts as mouth and mind. 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, author of The Dance of No Hard Feelings

With her hallmark wit and brilliance, Melissa Broder has followed up her heralded When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother with Meat Heart, a book of poems that is at once apocalyptic, full of sorrow, and packed with images crystalline in their beauty and truth. In these poems, Broder takes us through a world that is both alien and familiar to the world that we already know, a wild landscape where there is “ash fish / and elemental octopi,” where “cornhusk filaments / Still jacket tongues,” and where in a place with “200 flavors of panic/the worst is seeing with no eyes.” All of these freakish things to help us confront the bald fact that we are all just a series of meat hearts ourselves. It is here that Broder shows her generosity as a poet, because she makes us a new world in these poems where we go beyond meat—a world where Broder tells us, “Somewhere I stopped looking for magic.” I guess she found all she needed; this book is full of magic.

–Dorothea Lasky, author of Thunderbird

The speaker in Meat Heart is either an old-world witch or a contemporary warlock. That is to say, this speaker-being gallops through time making thrilling observations. There is a focus on meat, blood and food. The poems tear through the reader with a reassuring giggle, yet remain ominous. Broder writes, “I find a thighbone in his mattress / and think of friends gone missing.” She also writers “G-d loves my hair,” so we are reminded not to be overly frightened. To read Meat Heart is to consume, perish, murder, glitter, and prophesize. To say that Broder is fearless is not saying enough.

–Natalie Lyalin, author of Pink and Hot Pink Habitat


Milk Fed

MILK FED

"Milk Fed is a romp…a pageant of bodily juices and exploratory fingers and moan after moan of delight."
–Los Angeles Times

"A dizzily compelling story of love, lust, addiction, faith, maternal longing, and…frozen yogurt."
–Vogue

"A revelation…Melissa Broder has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year..."
–Entertainment Weekly

"A thrilling examination of hunger, desire, faith, family and love."
–Time

"Milk Fed bravely questions the particularly female lionization of thin and loathing of fat, landing on fresh explanations…deliciously droll…a celebration of bodily liberation."
–The New York Times

"Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed is a delectable exploration of physical and emotional hunger."
–The Washington Post

"A sensuous and delightfully delirious tale… Filled with an unadulterated filthiness that would make Philip Roth blush, Broder’s latest is a devour-it-in-one-sitting wonder."
–O, the Oprah Magazine

Superdoom

SUPERDOOM

The Pisces

THE PISCES

"A modern-day mythology for women on the verge — if everything on the surface stops making sense, all you need to do is dive deeper.."
–The New York Times

"The Pisces convincingly romances the void."
–The New Yorker

"Explosive, erotic, scathingly funny…a profound take on connection and longing that digs deep."
–Entertainment Weekly

"The dirtiest, most bizarre, most original works of fiction I’ve read in recent memory…Broder has a talent for distilling graphic sexual thoughts, humor, female neuroses and the rawest kind of emotion into a sort of delightfully nihilistic, anxiety-driven amuse bouche…"
–Vogue.com

"A page turner of a novel…funny and frank."
–Washington Post

"The Pisces is an intellectual, enthralling voyage into one woman’s swirling mind as she brushes with the extraordinary."
–Refinery29

"Get ready to laugh-cry over and over again...a perverse romance that captures the addictive and destructive forces of obsessive love. The Pisces is as hilarious as it is heartbreaking."
–Vulture.com

Last Sext

LAST SEXT

So Sad Today

SO SAD TODAY

"What separates Broder from her confessional cohort...is that she doesn’t seem to be out to shock, but to survive."
–Elle

"Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions…She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase."
–New York Magazine

"A triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose."
–Vanity Fair

"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."
–Nylon

"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays…is as raw as it is funny."
–Cosmopolitan

"Broder writes about the hot-pink toxins inhaled every day by girls and women...and the seemingly impossible struggle to exhale something pure, maybe even eternal...there's a bleak beauty in the way she articulates her lowest moments."
–Bookforum

"Broder may be talking about things like sexts, Botox, and crushes, but these things are considered alongside contemplations about mortality, identity, and the difficulty of finding substance in a world where sometimes it’s so much easier to exist behind a screen."
–The Fader

"…So Sad Today is uplifting and dispiriting in seemingly equal measure. It’s a book that’s incredibly human in the way it allows for deep self-reflection alongside Broder, which speaks not only to her powerful writing but also the internet’s magical ability to foster connections."
–A.V. Club

"...delightful...Broder embarks on an earnest, sophisticated inquiry into the roots and expressions of her own sadness...deeply confessional writing brings disarming humor and self-scrutiny...Broder's central insight is clear: it is ok to be sad, and our problems can't be reduced to a single diagnosis. "
–Publishers Weekly

"Broder is probably the Internet’s most powerful merchant of feelings…"
–GQ

"Vividly rendered and outspokenly delivered essays…Sordid, compulsively readable entries that lay bare a troubled soul painstakingly on the mend."
–Kirkus Reviews

Scarecrone

S C A R E C R O N E

"Broder manages to conjure a psychic realm best described as one part twisted funhouse and two parts Catholic school, heavy on libido and with a dash of magick. This gritty, cherry soda–black book...is bizarrely sexy in its monstrousness."
–Publishers Weekly

"I don’t know what a book is if not a latch to elsewhere, and Scarecrone has pressed its skull against the hidden door. It is neither drunk nor ecstatic to be here—it is a state unto itself."
–VICE

"Lushly dark and infused with references to black magic, Broder's work often feels less like a book and more like a mystical text."
–PAPERMAG

Meat Heart

MEAT HEART

"Out to 'crucify boredom,' her poems show us how any relationship with the divine is no less at risk of engendering grotesque lust...What makes Broder such a pleasure on the page is her insistence that these dramas play out on a workaday stage infused with surreal Pop and imaginative muscle..."
–Publishers Weekly

"With a title recalling Yeats...Broder risks the divine in her second book...shrewd, funny, twisted, sad poems..."
–The Chicago Tribune

"Meat Heart...is unbelievable and overwhelming for its imaginative power alone, but if you listen past the weird you can hear all sorts of things: sadness, seriousness, life, death, and a whole lot of laughter....Broder is a tremendous talent"
–Flavorwire

"...Meat Heart embodies that strain of sustenance, that sort of psychosomatic excitement most valiant art more or less tries to pull off…Her poems don’t bore or bear down. They beam oracle energy. They pump a music of visions for the life-lusty death dance."
–BOMB

Melissa Broder's Book Cover

MOTHER

“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