McEqualizer
Sometimes I feel jealous of Arda Collins.
Then I watch Micky-Mick struttin’ and remember: Arda can’t do this.
When the Moon Is In the Seventh House
Actual poster owned in college
At 20 I went through a dark period involving copious Easy Cheese, psychedelic beads and a hot glue gun. During this time (we’ll call it the crafty binge-eating hippie era) I became deeply enmeshed in astrology.
While I no longer actively, uh, practice astrology, I still have “the gift.”
All this week, I’ll be providing an astrological love analysis for anyone who buys the book from Small Press Distribution. You’re single you say? Even better! I’ll tell you who to date and who to avoid.
Just shoot me an email on my contact page. And believe.
Oscar Wilde Would Have Twittered
The riveting conclusion to our 2.5-part series.
In our first installment twittering poets wrote about the impact of social networking on their craft. One commenter wrote of the post: “It makes me feel like throwing up…I don’t even know what Twitter is, and I don’t want to know. Sounds like stupid shit. I came here to read about Richard Hugo.”
Self-loathing was imminent. And yet we soldiered on…
In installment 1.5 Brandon ‘Scott’ Gorrell expounded on the techniques of various twittering writers he admires and read the tea leaves of my Twitter style as well (‘confused,’ ‘tired’). He also addressed the proliferation of ‘scare quotes’ and took what may be his first public step in becoming a more streamlined ‘Brandon [no Scott] Gorrell.’
Now, for the eye-popping finale, we go the way of so many poets and move on to prose. Below, some of the liveliest twittering prose writers of our generation send this baby home!
Lydia Davis Doesn’t Twitter
Last summer, I curated a reading at Polestar for Brandon Scott Gorrell and other members of the Muumuu House extended family. Brandon is the author of the poetry collection During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present. On Twitter he is @LydiaDavis. I like these.
The reading was July 4th weekend. Two people came. The Muumuus grew silent. They were young, vegan-thin, styled by Vice. I was turning 30, eating animal byproducts on the sneak, looking extra-Jewy. Sorry, I said.
Months later, I wondered what Brandon thought of me. Did he ever think of me at all? Was I at fault for the poor showing on The Lower East Side, or could we all shoulder the blame? One question in particular kept me chewing the Nicorette late into the night: Could I get to the bottom of those ‘scare quotes’?
I had an opportunity to email with Brandon for my last post: Richard Hugo Didn’t Twitter, in which I asked a number of poets how Twitter has affected their craft. Brandon’s response stood out from the fray. I saw my moment. Went Bill Moyers on him:
Richard Hugo Didn’t Twitter
Triggering Town or Trending Topic?
Tao Lin, who is more prolific than Lil Wayne, recently had this to say on Twitter:
someone fb msg’d me re ‘writing tips’ re ‘being focused,’ seems like all i was able to suggest was to ‘not have friends’
I find Lin’s suggestion curious. The energy I spend pre-meditating my tweets (yes) distracts me more from the process of writing poems than does any genuine interaction with other members of the species. On Twitter, I dumb down a notch and ham it up two. I don’t calculate syllabics; I calculate followers. I’m no longer writing for my ideal audience (Jewish girls with a junkie fetish) (me). I’m writing for everyone. I feel like Joan Rivers on HGH.
Below, I’ve conducted a little survey of other poets on Twitter to see what they have to say about if/how Twitter has affected their craft:
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
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