Over a series of insomniac nights, I wrote a collection of poems inspired by the Oneohtrix Point Never album R Plus Seven. For every track on the album, there is a poem. These aren’t lyrics. Simply, they are words that translate the feels I encountered in experiencing each track. Words are all I have. As much as I am often scared of my feels in waking life, I love and embrace them in poetrylife. You might call the process audio ekphrasis.

The collection is now this week’s first look at Rhizome / The New Museum. What this means is the collection has taken over the Rhizome.org homepage for the week via a New Museum series. (i think?)

The collection will live permanently on NewHive, which is the tool I used to assemble the poems so that each text has the corresponding audio embedded.

Coverage at Fact and Dazed.

Thanks to curator Harry Burke.

OPN 4ever.


HERE IS AN E-CHAPBOOK I MADE OF 13 NEW POEMS COMMISSIONED BY NEWHIVE

HERE IS WHAT THE MAGICK DENNIS COOPER POSTED ABOUT SCARECRONE

HOW IS YR IMAGINATION?

MINE IS GOOD


RESPONSE TO A WISH EXPRESSED BY ONE OF MY TWITTER FOLLOWERS TO FIND A NOTE FROM ME IN A BOX OF BANDAIDS AT CVS (I SENT HIM THIS NOTE IN A BOX OF BANDAIDS)

Dear _________,

If I found a note inside a box of bandaids at CVS I would want it to say YOU ARE GOING TO BE OKAY. I keep waiting for a grownup to tell me YOU ARE GOING TO BE OKAY but that grownup unfortunately has to be me for me. I also want that grownup to tell me what to do though I hate being told what to do or maybe I love it.

In any event, I can barely do anything IRL. The ghost I pine after is a midwestern fantasy and I know nothing about chili or bratwurst or having people come stay in one’s home and feeling relaxed about it and making them feel welcome, so even that ghost is not for me.

I don’t know anything about you but I assume if you hung around my twitter feed long enough to want a note in a box of bandaids you actively feel some uncertainty about things, maybe your life, the world or your place in it? What I mean to say is that none of us really know what is going on or what we are doing but if we can just reach out to each other once in a while and express that in the ways we can (which for me is sending this note) then I think that helps us feel less alone, terminally unique, weird in the ways we don’t want to feel weird.

Or maybe you have it all figured out, in which case mazel tov and thank you for wishing for this note — it made me feel special and weird in the ways I want to feel weird.

Be well, I wish you exciting and meaningful experiences, people and things.

Melissa Broder


Here is a new poem at The Yalobusha Review

Here are two new poems at Housefire

I am teaching a class called Grand Theft Poetics. You can take it if you want. It will be rad. Here is what Blackbook says abt it. Here is more info + reg.

Ellen Frances video-interviewed me at Everyday Genius abt hot boys on beds in pink smoke <3

Also, I’ve started doing some video stuff. I call it ‘video stuff’ not ‘video art’  bc it’s bad.

 


dear god
i rlly need yr help right now
begin the terrors
begin the miracles

dear melissa
be with yourself
it is going to come
from being still w yrself
and don’t tweet too much bb

dear god
hey asshole, you got me into this mess now get me out
p.s. fuck you
p.p.s. fuck america & images of romantic love, fuck the brits, fuck the french too, fuck heathcliff, fuck cathy, fuck justin bieber, fuck the video for as long as you love me

dear melissa
i am always here and i am very hot and sexy
i always want you
call on me more often

dear god
what do you look like?

dear melissa
what do you want me to look like?

dear god
sorry but you seem like a crappy substitution for something more awesome

dear melissa
okay

dear god
this note is not for anybody besides you and me, just kidding it’s for the internet. wld be cool if you cld appear as candy, boys or the internet, but you are such a nebulous prick and i’m not in the mood to try and get closer to you as you are

dear melissa
don’t move
i’ll be right there

dear god
i need to hear you say puke for me baby
i need you to make me feel like a beloved child

dear melissa
puke for me baby


FOUR NEW POEMS AT BOMB + ART BY PAUL K TUNIS (aka da man)

ALSO, AN INTERVIEW AT BOMB ABOUT WHEN DRUGS STOP WORKING, GOD, PUDDING, THE USUAL…


Treehead stuff at the Poetry Society of America.

Humility at The Nervous Breakdown.

Courtney Maum channeled Gwyneth Paltrow & reviewed MEAT HEART.


Paul Tunis (aka da man) and I collaborated on a comic at The Rumpus. But really I just wrote like 20 words and he spun them into a hot pink & black existential inferno that manages to incorporate a giganto guinea pig, hot punk twinks & the Manson fam into a window at Bergdorfs.

Next, some Dutch people got ahold of the comic and posted it on what looks to be a VERY hip and ‘relevant’ blog out of Amsterdam.  Feel hip. Feel relevant. Feel #ontzagwekkend. Have fooled the Dutch.

Also at The Rumpus is a super-thoughtful review of MEAT HEART by Matthew Zingg.

Made a mixtape for Electric Literature called HOW TO AVOID A POETRY READING


Did the Other People podcast. Topics include: stalking, all-girls schools, self-piercing, shrooming, Pink Floyd laser light shows, darkness, excesses, adrenaline, panic, and the commodification of New Age spirituality. Honestly, this is worth listening to just for Brad Listi’s 10 minute monologue on Fassbender’s penis and its relationship to the human condition.

Jennifer L. Knox interviewed me, Sommer Browning, Amy Lawless, Sharon Mesmer and Rachel Shukert about being funny.



 

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 have a new poem at Guernica

I have three new poems at The Awl

I wrote an ekphrastic piece for Soft Spot Gallery based on Jesse Hlebo’s visual piece “Deep”


Still Life of Me Thinking of Me

Here is a vid of me reading at the release of Chris Toll’s The Disinformation Phase. Three things have since been cut from this poem (the daughters line, the butchers line, and the word “shit”). Thanks for filming it Adam Robinson. Chris’s book is like a weird church & Bob Dylan put in a blender, so I really like it.

Here are two new poems of mine in interrupture.


Snow Bling

The best thing I got for Chanukah was a bling sleep mask. Thanks Rose!

Mother made the SPD poetry bestseller list again for December and Ampersand is going back for a reprint. Holla.

Here’s me coolin’ out on the AM NY xmas list.

I talked with Ryan Call, one of my fave internet friends, about lit blogs over at Electric Literature.

I reviewed Nate Pritts’ Big Bright Sun for The Rumpus and forgot to tell you.

I’m doing lots of readings in 2011 and would luv if you would come to one.

That’s the story, mornin glory.


Things I Thought About In the Uffizi Gallery

Venus’s ass is a juicy ass.
I want to hump all over her jujubee nipple.
What does it mean to be a fully-formed woman?
You or time or age have taken me from the map of me.
While Venus reclines w/ poppies on her belly, I rifle through my purse for a bone.
If I am born today I am born today.


Another Feckin Poster


Another Feckin Poster


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