Mike Young is the author of Sprezzatura (poems), Look! Look! Feathers (stories), and We Are All Good If They Try Hard Enough (poems). He designs and publishes NOÖ Journal and runs Magic Helicopter Press. Visit his blog at http://mikeayoung.tumblr.com. He lives in Santa Fe, NM.
I like this poem “The Rumored Existence of Other People” by Timothy Donnelly. It showed up to me via Swindle. The poem is about audaciously thinking in very reasonable and terrifying ways.
All history is alternative history. But some history is more alternative than others. But some history is altercation with Others. What I really mean to say is every history has little moments that are suggestions into other stories for purposes of maximizing the story’s use of your storymaking brain. Things that “make the world” of the story “come alive.” Another way of thinking about this is that analogies often ask us to imagine some crazy shit. But only for as long as it takes to make the analogy work. For example, I’ve heard the chemical effect of coffee on the brain described as putting a brick under your brake pedal. “Okay, check.” We use our imagination to produce a feeling or an understanding (every image is its own feeling), and then we put that feeling/understanding in a suitcase and take it back to our original parameters. “Oh, coffee! So that’s how coffee works on the brain, okay.” Meanwhile, we’ve discarded the continuation of a very interesting (maybe?) story in its own right: driving around with a brick under your brake pedal. READ MORE >
Ben Fama emailed the Pioneer Valley Division of HTMLGIANT to let us know that SUPERMACHINE is having a release party on Friday in New York for its second issue. It looks pretty epic. Here are the specs:
Friday, Sept. 10, 7:30pm
The Schoolhouse330 Ellery St. #3 (between Broadway and Beaver)
Brooklyn, NY
Readings! Music! Your Autumn Crush!
with:
…
Macgregor Card
Chris Cheney
Lonely Christopher
Corina Copp
Jon Cotner
Joanna Penn Cooper
Brandon Downing
Anne Cecelia Holmes
Lauren Ireland
Simone Kearney
Dorothea Lasky
Paul Legault
Emily Pettit
Christie Ann Reynolds
Matvei Yankelevich
Matthew YeagerWith Music by FORMA
Are You Fucking Kidding Me ?!
“In tennis you’re on an island. Of all the games men and women play, tennis is the closest to solitary confinement, which inevitably leads to self-talk, and for me the self-talk starts here in the afternoon shower. This is when I begin to say things to myself, crazy things, over and over, until I believe them.”
esque is a new online journal from Amy King and Ana Bozicevic. The site is Flash, so it takes a minute to load, but it’s worth it:
oetry is the kitchen sink.
Charles Bernstein. Bei Dao. Tamiko Beyer. Jackie Clark. Amy De’Ath. Lidija Dimkovska. Kate Durbin. Steven Karl. Natalie Lyalin. Filip Marinovich. Sharon Mesmer. Miguel Murphy. Ariana Reines. Saeed Jones. Tomaz Salamun. Evie Shockley. Heidi Lynn Staples. Leigh Stein. Cole Swensen. John Tranter. Matvei Yankelevich.ifesto is everything but.
Jennifer Bartlett. Jillian Brall. Ching-In Chen. Ken Chen. Rachel Blau DuPlessis. Jennifer H. Fortin. Molly Gaudry. Roxane Gay. Matt Hart. Brenda Hillman. Dan Hoy. Ron Padgett & Olivier Brossard. Lars Palm. Joan Retallack. Brandon Shimoda. Anne Waldman. Franz Wright. Carolyn Zaikowski.
Check out this cool video for the novel Bad Bad Bad by GIANT Commenteriat regular Jesus Angel Garcia. The video’s all about asking people what they fear. My favorite is the lady who says “Falling off a cliff!” immediately and cheerfully. I also really like the indignant guy with a missing tooth. Some people seem to fear themselves or “actualizing” themselves, and I have no idea what that means but I think it has to do with facial hair. Me I’m afraid of major burns. And maybe that one kind of inverse amnesia where you wake up as the only person who remembers a certain thing, like the Chicago Blackhawks or Cheerios.
While we’re on the subject of suggestion, why not check out shiny new online poetry mag Vinyl, edited by Gregory Sherl and K.MA. Sullivan. Cherry trees on fire, writing the saddest letters of your life on a train, a girl from northern Maine becomes a lip balm model, a gun in locker F8 at the gym, and much more. Including Bob Hicok’s grocery list, which deliberately instructs him not to buy raining hips.
Scrambler Books—which (like Flatmancrooked) manages to be awesome despite being based in turd-haven-of-a-city Sacramento—is releasing two upcoming books of poetry that I’m stoked about: Kendra Grant Malone’s Everything Is Quiet and Matthew Savoca’s long love poem with descriptive title. You can get these books separate or together, or together in a hardcover edition, which is pretty fancy for indie lit, right? Click here and here for sample poems from Malone and here and here for Savoca poems. These are sure to both be tender and exhausted collections that feel like drinking the wrong beverage at the wrong time and somehow having that be the only thing that makes you feel better. Can’t wait.
The new We Are Champion is out. Oregon Trail poems, fuckage of maps, junk parades, notes on being torn apart by horses, and much more. Girls and boys and carrot discharge. Go read the only online literary magazine that has been documented next to Shaq.
Julie Doxsee is doing a “blog tour” for her terrific new book, Objects For a Fog Death, so I asked Julie to write about her 5 favorite object combinations and her 5 favorite objects to leave by themselves. She did us better than my essaystic suggestion and wrote these “fabley little poem paragraphs.” I have used sophisticated Google Image Search techniques to jimmy up some complements. Enjoy!
Giraffe tooth/Helmet
You pull into a nook in the alley and my helmet clunks yours and this is a kind of talk we’re having but in the talk there is a kill wish and a rocket launch and a bright laser-beam lengthening our hearts across the sidewalk end to end. There is blood and light. You pull a giraffe tooth from your pocket, center it in your palm and say have you ever seen one of these? From under my tongue I pull a giraffe tooth. I center it on my palm and say yes. We sit this way until the shadows disappear. READ MORE >