I don’t want to be anything not even a poet, just trembles.
The way you get a poet to love you is be a ghost.
One ghost did this for me.
I rotted so hard in my wetness that I turned into a ghost myself.
But I remained a poet at heart.
That was my big mistake.
Oh god of ghosts and corporeal forms.
Help me torch my heart.
Here are two new poems at The Green Mountains Review.
Flavorwire says I will make you care about poetry (thx Jason Diamond).
Sampson Starkweather and I did a collab thing at HTML for his new anthology.
Been sexting a lot. Might post some here (just mine, not the ones I get).
**update** Not going to post any sexts just yet, but–
Someone emailed me and asked if I am able to sext without developing feelings. And if so, how do I do it? And if not, how do I move on when it stops?
I said this:
‘I always get feelings and it’s always a problem and it can be a distraction from poetry but in the end the feelings are generative for poetry. I think.’
There is a lot more I could say on this subject regarding the heartache and blessings of being a creative human/addictive human/human inclined toward projecting my own fantasy narrative onto others so as to generate wonderful feelings within myself that are the equivalent of a high, which then lead to a low when the fantasy inevitably dissolves one way or another (as fantasy always does) (thus exacerbating the tension between want and reality) (which leaves me no other choice but to write or die) but it’s all there in my poems.
Ultimately the poems feel redemptive, despite my sometimes-failure to learn from my own mistakes.
I don’t think you have to suffer to make art, and I don’t think my sometimes-failure to learn from my own mistakes has the goal of making art in mind at the outset, but I do think that both come from the same place within me maybe. It’s the wanting out of self, the longing for something higher–sometimes by way of misguided vehicles– beautiful and ugly.
Somebody sent me a stalker email and I hope he is hot and under 30. He believes I am having a good day, but he is wrong unless this pain is going to break open into some phoenix shit soon. I don’t know why I expect that I can be a poet and never go through the dark woods. I want to go around the woods and write about them from the outside but this is not the truth of my life right now. Nail polish, dicks and control are some tools that I have used to go around the woods and they all delivered me right back there when they ended. One spiritual teacher says we can sit with our pain without identifying as our pain, but I don’t want to do either. Last night I saw a video by a band named Methface or something. It was just scary ghost screams and a woman, hanging.
Two new poems in beautiful Sixth Finch (poem 1 and poem 2).
Two new poems at The Good Men Project.
Poetry Crush asked me to write abt a dead poet I want to fuck, but I am tired of dead ppl so I wrote abt poetboys and pubes and porn.
Tell the story of how I decimate the worms in my brain and tell it using pedestrian language.
Ok I am either the luckiest girl in the world or totally fucked.
Starting July 14th this is the year of learning to love the questions.
That is how the worms are slaughtered.
Was Rilke a gay man?
When the gays give me advice about extermination they don’t just let me flail like I am the roach.
The gays have always led me to Jerusalem.
Watch me watch a skinny boy in a Misfits t-shirt eat cheese fries for the rest of my life.
Watch me graffiti a fake rock.
“I’m super laid-back down to earth very open-minded. Passionate about my life and thrive off of new exciting situations and meeting other like minded individuals. What about you?”
“I’m uptight in outer space and only open-minded b/c I don’t really pay attention to anyone but myself. Lukewarm about my life and thrive off meeting individuals who will never be obsessed with me enough.”
Prob d0 not give myself enough credit when I say NO ONE WOULD WANT TO SEE MY TITS WITH TEXT JUXTAPOSED ON TOP.
I am praying for a train delay.
The boykittens crawl up my walls and ask how to get jobs.
The walls are made of contemporary condominium fibers.
They are not even in me.
They are not even on me.
Motherfucker.
Who would you rather be?
I forget the nubile tits of others until an elderly boykitten points them out.
I’m a sheep not a discoverer.
This isn’t a persona text.
I guess it is a text that refers to itself.
A box arrives from Amazon, full of boys in yellow shirts that say Jesus Saves At K-Mart. The boys are hoarders. They are hoarding themselves inside this box. You can plant the boys in mud and from their eyes a nun with a mole on her hand will grow. You can put the boys in plastic bags and throw them on a snowy highway to make cars honk out the tune of Just Wanna See His Face. Let’s not do that. Let’s visualize a Nike swoosh in a blue sky and call it abstinence. Let’s take no hostages and shop lonely. There is a ceiling to every chandelier, but at least the ceiling is pink. The blue sky is contained under this pink ceiling. Sadly, the ceiling is faceless. Wanna know how I know?
My dick is a disaster area.
My dick is scared it has a Mrs. Robinson vibe.
My dick is talking about a dark web & where each strand meets is a black sapphire.
My dick is paranoid?
My dick is trying to “become whole.”
My dick features a recording of the ocean.
My dick lives by the ocean but it needs the recording to relax.
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.
I have five new poems in rad online journal Action, Yes.
I reviewed Jamie Iredell’s reallyfuckinggood book The Book of Freaks for The Rumpus.
Also, can we just discuss the peyote montage in Young Guns. The peyote montage is that special something I’ve been searching for my entire life.
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.
"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
