SMILES YOU CAN’T STOP: Winners
Pumpkins have long since rotted, and Massachusetts is trying to convince us that thirty-degree sunlight passes for bloomage. Which must mean the winners of the unstoppable smiles pumpkin caption contest are: Jeremy Bauer, Ted Powers, and Noah Falck. I know I said I’d only pick two, but I liked all three of their captions. Thanks to Ken Baumann for sponsoring the contest by accidentally buying two copies of Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable. Winners, email me at mikeayoung AT gmail DOT com with your mailing addresses to get your free books. Everybody else: the kid is bobbing for apples, not puking, but you shouldn’t let that stop you.
SMILES YOU CAN’T STOP: Win a Free Book
So Ken Baumann (author of the forthcoming Solip from Tyrant Books in 2012; congrats Ken!) accidentally bought two copies of Jason Bredle’s heart-sifting and twisting Smiles of the Unstoppable. When I offered to refund the extra money, he generously suggested I give the extra copy away on HTMLGIANT, which brings us to the pumpkin below this paragraph. See, I wanted to do a caption contest where I posted a picture of Ken smiling, but for some reason I found this picture of a pumpkin, which was actually even better than a picture of Ken getting Lasik surgery.
Here’s the contest: Post a caption to this pumpkin smile picture in the comments. Best 2 captions win copies of Smiles of the Unstoppable. Deadline: next Friday, March 25th. Very easy. Bonus points if Ken/Jason are somehow involved in an adventure with the pumpkin. See the picture, amplify your best/Jimmy Cheniest wit, and win some terrific poetry. Also you can go see Jason Bredle read at the Tucson Lit Press Fest on the 26th of March. So my best suggestion is to win this book, read some poems from it to your rich lover, and have your rich lover swoon so hard they buy you a ticket to Tucson. Duh. Very easy. Ready set go. If you need further convincing, read Jason’s poem “Moby Dick” below the jump, originally published at Ken’s No Posit. READ MORE >
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop Smiling
Smiles of the Unstoppable is a 60-page collection of 34 poems, each one about a page to two pages long. It’s a really nicely designed book. Magic Helicopter Press released it on January 1. (Magic Helicopter, of course, is the press run by HTMLGiant’s own super-productive Mike Young.) At first glance the cover image appears to be a kid mid-puke, but if you keep looking you’ll see what it actually is — a kid bobbing for apples. The poems are similar. READ MORE >
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February 16th, 2011 / 2:24 pm
February 16th, 2011 / 2:24 pm
Sixth Finch
SIXTH FINCH is a new (to me at least) online journal, whose just published a new issue. It has work by Jason Bredle and Zachary Schomburg and several others.
In addition to poetry, they also feature a whole section of art, which is a nice twist on the usual poetry journal I think. More sites should vary outside of the fiction poetry land. The art in the current issue is weird and modern looking, I would look at it and stuff.
I feel really tired. Thinking about being mean has made me tired. I am ready for boobs friday to close us out and go back to the week of week.
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October 16th, 2008 / 8:03 pm
October 16th, 2008 / 8:03 pm
Checking In On Jason Bredle
Pain Fantasy by Jason Bredle is one of the most enjoyable books of poetry I’ve read this year. Strange, funny, dark, heartbreaking, mixing in sports and wordplay (yes, sports), there was a lot to like about this collection. Bredle has also been hitting the online journals – most recently three solid pieces in the latest issue of No Posit.
Some writers you just want to know what they are working on. At least I have a list in my head like this. I emailed Jason Bredle and asked him to talk a little about what he’s working on. What follows is the response I got:
Basically I decided to divide up all my poems from the past two years and make two chapbooks out of them, but I haven’t even made the chapbooks, and I don’t know how to get them published even if I do make them. I’m thinking maybe instead I’ll let them fall in love with each other and make a baby. I don’t think this is really newsworthy, though. I thought I was going to finish a manuscript in June and I put all this time into revising and reordering poems and then I went to LA and decided while I was there that I was going to scrap the whole thing, so I came home and rewrote a lot of things all over again. Did you ever see Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story? It’s very much like the part where John C. Reilly is doing all this acid and working on the same song for six months. I didn’t love that movie as much as I’d hoped I would, but it was worth seeing just for that scene. I’ve only written two poems in the past three months. One I wrote a week before I was hospitalized, and then I was sick for a little while, and then I wrote another, and then I started working a lot of extra hours and haven’t had time to sit down and write, or when I do I go back to this poem called Caspian Sea, which is essentially a blank page I spend hours looking at with Caspian Sea written at the top.
I also asked who he was reading, what writers he likes:
Mark Halliday has a new book out, which I’m reading. He’s my favorite poet. I was going to try to find this one particular poem of his on the internet and send it to a friend of mine so if I can find it I’ll also send it to you. Okay, I just looked around and I couldn’t find it, but it doesn’t help that I don’t really remember the title.
For those who haven’t read Jason Bredle, I suggest doing a google search and picking up his books.