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.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DRZeZySKS0
The very generous Walser & Co / Robert Walser Society of Western Massachusetts is giving away two limited edition Heather Christle broadsides of her poems “Vespers” and “Barnstormer” from Notnostrums and Nor By Press respectively.
What do you have to do? All you have to do is leave a comment on their blog with the name of your favorite bookstore! That’s it. Maggie the cat will randomly pick a winner. Easy, no heartburn, only the heart cola of Christle’s poetry.
Stay tuned for tomorrow afternoon, when we introduce the final poem of H.C. Week. Keep your brains full of that light stuff.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDPo5xFLwXw
The Drunk Sonnets by Daniel Bailey is a book of sonnets in all caps, written drunk and edited sober. Death sentences by broccoli and merciful rivers and toys donated to the fire department. Plus lots of bodies and “rank 80-proof emotion” (sayeth K. Silem Mohammad). There are a few ways to get this book. First you can order it. Or, if you’re ambitious, you can film a drunk friend in a drunk situation reading one of the drunk sonnets drunkenly (you can find some here), and if you upload this video to a video-sharing site (you don’t have to be drunk when you do this) and email me about it (magichelicopter_at_gmail.com) I will send you a free one. Like Teddy here, right? Drunk videos, drunk sonnets, drunk <3.
Also, there are Daniel Bailey interviews all over and Daniel Bailey’s bathtub.
I don’t like beer.
Matchbook is a new-ish online magazine from Brian Mihok and Edward Mullany that seems to have been named in sympathy with the matching Ms of their last names. It’s doing some sweetly innovative stuff in a way that’s crisp and smart, not puffy or attention mongering. Each story is paired with commentary from the author. That’s the big thing. This makes each piece feel curated, foregrounds process. I guess you could say Matchbook is a real writer’s magazine, all the emphasis on thoughts “behind the story,” but I feel that might not be giving readerlyness the right credit, because I know that I am often even more interested in the procedures of art I can’t fathom: basketball, sculpting, scalping, etc. Matchbook also has the most popular group on Fictionaut thanks in large part to Mullany’s thoughtful discussion facilitating. These boys are in it for the haul. Scott Garson’s hyperlinked story “About Me and My Cousin” is the newest piece up at Matchbook, and it weirdly reminds me of the Small Worlds game that Matthew Simmons posted here a few days ago. Or yesterday? It is still raining? Have I given up completely on socks? This is the kind of glug juice that’s normally in my head. Kudos to Mihok and Mullany for giving me things to read that are far more interesting than what’s usually in my head.
Imagine yourself for a moment a laundry basket. A duffel bag of laundry, a black trash bag of laundry. Whatever. You’re one. Is there not, in the terrifying accumulation of our lives, a distinction between giving yourself away and asking to try someone on? Let’s say I ask if you’re okay. If you’re much pleasured by the current sky. Curried rice. Jim Carrey or ice cream. In so asking I’m digging in, hand in your basket, to take and pull a little cloth of yourself over a naked me-bit. Which is not always aggressive. Sometimes you do want me to ask you things; sometimes you’d rather I didn’t. I don’t want to talk about 2009, Facebook surveys, Michael Bloomberg’s polling strategies, focus groups for salsa commercials. It’s all relevant, but what I most want to say about Padgett Powell’s eye-twist of a novel (and I mean novel, like damn that’s novel) The Interrogative Mood is that its one-hundred-sixty-four pages of questions and question marks remind me that I am afraid of people, in love with people, hungry to know people, and made (bye laundry metaphor) mostly to be dispensed: what I mean is all that water.
David Ensminger’s Trailer Park Fragments: A Place Called Whispering Lanes is a new e-book available from Magic Helicopter Press. It has more true lines than a lot of things I’ve ever read, and I’m pretty sure you can live inside of it the same way I’m pretty sure you can fill your backpack with persimmons. Those are the reasons I published it. I hope you might like to read it. There is also a music video opportunity.
“”There has been