Melissa Broder Online

Here are two new poems at Coconut. After a few yrs hiatus, it’s back and the whole issue is amazing.

Michael Robbins covered MEAT HEART at The Chicago Tribune along with Dorothea Lasky and Eileen Myles who are two of my favorite contemporary poets. #mainstreammedia

This is what he said:

With a title recalling Yeats (“Consume my heart away; sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal”), Broder risks the divine in her second book: “Yesterday the worship rattled like an engine / I said Let this voltage last forever.” But the voltage won’t. These shrewd, funny, twisted, sad poems were written by a “Lonesome Cowgirl” who “stopped looking for magic” somewhere and now just wants to “buzz all night.” “Once I was a nightrider with a wild rag. / Now I haven’t seen a horse in three years.” The familiar vacillation of spiritual yearning and sensual pleasure is given an upgrade: “Please describe / your vomiting; it is like a psalm to me / a place where wilderness might be new.” “Boredom is going to get crucified” on Broder’s watch. She likes “the taste of scabs” and eats from “a trash can at Hardee’s.”

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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…

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Dennis Cooper put MEAT HEART on his mid-2012 top 10 lists omg

Giancarlo DiTrapano digs my twitter feed (and MEAT HEART I think) at Vice.

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Treehead stuff at the Poetry Society of America.

Humility at The Nervous Breakdown.

Courtney Maum channeled Gwyneth Paltrow & reviewed MEAT HEART.

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MEAT HEART is #4 ON SPD BESTSELLER LIST!

Also, Julia Jackson interviewed me at Electric Literature involving the transcendental, escapism and Young Guns II.

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LOOK WHAT PATRICK SOMERVILLE SAID ABOUT MEAT HEART IN FLAVORWIRE SMALL PRESS RECS YEAH!

“Meat Heart by Melissa Broder 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. I love it. Broder is a tremendous talent and I’m glad that book exists.”

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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