Beecher’s has been hanging out in my living room for a while.  I read it.  Summary, or “my brain on Beecher’s”:

Cover:  Beecher’s:  it’s a b with a gun and a red one over

p.1            I like the size of this journal, and its paper, and its design.  Back to basics, ya know?

p.6 “I protect the values of this family by being impossible to stop as a singer and a poet, for I am charming in the very worst way” is amusing, Alec Niedenthal.

p.8 I never saw Body Worlds but heard it was made from executed Chinese

prisoners, which is disturbing,  isn’t it.

p.10 Line 5,  “insouciant” when Google searched means:  lighthearted unconcern

p.12 “-rain slipping like slim girls of cousinship and dream between sill and pane…” is immediately amazing, and on second read, Joshua Cohen’s “The Rules (Gulf Version)” makes for the most hypothetically arousing, deranged drinking game yet devised.  Cheers.

p.19 Somewhere between Rhoads Stevens’ “a hard knot in her mouth” and “the bottom of the ocean on that shipping lane” is Paul Banks singing “Stella!  Stella-ah!” like it’s an allusion to that movie sort-of-by Tennessee Williams, except it’s actually an allusion to getting a blowjob, which is just so funny and cool.

p.21 Value of coffee  >  value of chapbook. – John Dermot Woods

p.25 The second use of “cantaloupe” as violent visceral object.  Perhaps both poems were written at the end of season when the fruit is between hyper-ripe and decomposing.

p.28 Interview with Adam Robinson, in which Beecher’s describes writing a poem as “preserving” some moment.  This would make words seem something like salt.  Or formalin.

p.37 AR: “…But knowing what a poem is about is different than knowing what it means.”

p.41 Are Creed J. Shepard’s poems talking to the reader or to themselves?

p.44 Oh, and I skipped Lincoln Michel’s by accident but read while writing this.  “A Question of Commitment” and “Foreign Lands.”  Both are awesome.  They reminded me of my heartache and that class I took on Republican Rome.

p.52 “Who hasn’t pictured themselves scantily clothed, draped in virgin sunlight, sipping frothed milk on a balcony?”  – Yelena Akhtiorskaya

p.65 While reading Coletti’s “Weird Dreams” remembering a poem can mean its feeling, “…we’re too complicated / for the ice cream / truck jingle / she wants her life to be…”

p.67 Colin Winnette writes a charming series of stories about people who are Ideas, or ideas who are People.  There is a girl named That Desert Island Question.  I bet she is hot and sandy in the author’s head.

p.75 Hello Ward & Young,  I love Debussy and hormones too. Did you mean “the appearance of the world is physically dependent on questions asked in love” literally?

p.91 Mom story.

p.99 Then Beccher’s asks Stephen Elliot  “How do you define honesty?”  (In writing is implied.)

p.111 But really, it all comes back to the pizza.  Ricky Garni’s “Pizza.”  Which is delivered by saint in pearly light, who is everything glorious that comes with crispy crust and cheese, all that is edible and enlightening, greasy and good.  Amen.

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Katie Smither is an artist and writer living in Austin.  She works at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas and does a lot of things on the side, or strike that and reverse it.