what I bought at AWP part 1

Billie The Bull by xTx // a Nephew of Mud Luscious Press (2012)

One of the (many) things I love about xTx is her knack for making small things so big. In perfect (67-page) Nephew form, she scalds continents, history, and embarks on a gruesome, anti-Hemingway dissection of bull fighting while recounting the absurd and beautifully rendered tragedy of an ever-expanding heroine. This one sinks roots, whether you want it to or not. Also xTx signed my book at the Dzanc/MLP table which was uplifting.

How Music Works by David Byrne // McSweeney’s (2012)

Some of the best stuff in this sometimes rambling and textbook-y ode to the musical process – recording it, making it, embellishing its history, looking good playing it – are the dozens of photographs both general and Talking-Heads related (puffy suit from Stop Making Sense). The cover feels like a Wendy’s booth, sadly minus the honey mustard residue. Byrne can write, but I’d rather listen to My Life in the Bush of Ghosts than know what drum machine Brian Eno used in the fifth minute of the third track. Maybe I’m selfish.

The Rumpus ‘Write Like A Motherfucker’ mug

At $10 this was a great purchase, a vessel equally suited for Emergen-C and Templeton Rye, both of which are in moderate-to-more-than-moderate rotation while stressing about not writing like a motherfucker or after the desire to write like a motherfucker has passed for the evening (or noon-ish). Thanks Rumpus!

Render / An Apocalypse by Rebecca Gayle Howell // Cleveland State University Poetry Center (2013)

If you’re going to go bleak, you’d better go all out and this book wants to stab you not just to see what it feels like but until you’re drained. Some of the most tense and stripped verse I can remember. I’m not sure what “truth” means but as I read these pastoral nightmares that inevitably involve animal slaughter the word scrolls through my brain again and again like a stock ticker on meth while I try not to flinch. “Let the black hard rock of want / tear the skin of your prized intestines / Squeal Squeal for more.”

This Semi-Perfect Universe by William Todd Seabrook // A Nephew of Mud Luscious Press (2012)

Not really into numerology but I’m into Nephews and this one is a good one. The number 100 is the culprit here and boy does it get messy. Quirk-laden factoids (“100 is a figment of our imaginations. It exists as much as a 100-key piano or a Buddhist dog.”; “In 1384 the number 100 disappeared for a month.”) transcend, tweak, rejoice, and obliterate, and make us want to throw another round of TP on the trees in front of that snarky 7^th grade algebra teacher with all his x and y and whatnot and hop on the next 100-car bus to one of the 243 as-yet-undiscovered universes – because after all, we can only perceive 100 of them. 27 pages I don’t want to take back.

Italian sausage-and-pepper sandwich and soggy ass fries by Jose the “chef”

The pleasant irony of eating something that tastes like tailgating amidst thousands of people in unisex jeans who used to skip gym class to cut themselves was great. Until I had to sprint out of the Don DeLillo reading two hours later in utter fear for my undergarments. Plus it was like 9 bucks.

fact is, I mean everything I say

Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall by Ken Sparling
(Mud Luscious Press re-release, 2012)
166 pages

I was super stoked when I found out Mud Luscious was re-releasing Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (originally published by Knopf in 1996) not only because Ken Sparling is the shit but because I already own a first edition of the book that I found more than a decade ago. Might sound like a douchey way of saying “ha ha already bought it, y'all small press ain’t getting no more of my PayPal funds!” but what I mean is that when a press like Mud Luscious puts out a book like this, it validates what I’ve thought for a long time: that the book is brilliantly unique (also I’m sure Mud Luscious will get more of my Monopoly money, don't worry). One of my English teachers must have been real cool because I remember being recommended Dad Says in high school and stumbling across a pristine copy soon after in the dollar bin at a library book sale and being like this cover art is dope or ill or whatever lame preppy gangsters said in 2001. I don’t remember any of the inside of the book though, just looking up and being like this is fucking weird over and over in a good way. Re-reading it now, I do the same. Everyone’s a flash fiction writer now and even though his book is a pretty much a non-linear novel, Ken Sparling feels like some awesome pale Canadian godfather of flash in being able to make the smallest moments like third trimester pregnant, revealing in a phrase a complex fear we all share but might not have known we had and what would have taken most people 200 pages to get right. An exercise in brevity and accumulation. Dad Says is comprised of the underlying and overlying fragments of a librarian’s life – not a particularly exciting one, wife and a kid, suburban condo – made unflinchingly and cleverly fascinating by the negative space, by what’s not said but can’t not be thought. A spiral of unraveling and uneasy memories, the need to matter and the futility of giving a shit, fleeting mundane self-slaps of modernity exposed with the dry wit we all wish we had to face them. The deceptively simple language that will make you yearn for a childish innocence but will crush your soul if you let it. Don’t forget about the sprinklings of doubt and extreme tenderness. There’s self-contained third-person vignettes thrown in for some good fun. Oh and jobs can be pretty stupid. God knows how depressing this might have been if it was not written during a time of relative peace and prosperity (were the 90s tight in Canada too?), and the title would have been Dad Says He Saw You on Amazon, but it’s stupid to keep talking about it you should probably just buy it (see, I’m supporting the small press community!). Anyways here are some good parts and by good I mean pretty much like how all of it is:

He lifts his face and there are marks on his face that were not there before. No one says anything. The angle of his head shears off the possibility of speech.

I think it’s the sound of it, “fish cakes,” and the way dinner comes along every night relentlessly, like a bomb.

They’ve drained all the swamps in Florida, just so you can sit by a pool and look at other people’s towels. On the way home it rains. We have to drive through Ohio. I hate Ohio.

It breaks my heart to think about my father. So I don’t think about my father. I think about my mother. It breaks my heart to think about my mother, too.

I died. I went to heaven. After a couple of weeks, I was given an apartment.

And there’s a part about Batman pogs that I highlighted in orange highlighter in 2001 that pretty much makes the whole thing worthwhile. Thanks Mud Luscious, for bringing this back to life.

five things i like about brandi wells' poisonhorse

1. The narrator gently poisons a companion horse. It doesn't mind all that much. In fact it sort of craves it. And long walks in the forest. Which is frighteningly, awesomely perfect.

2. Reading is for people who like to make the images move themselves. Wells' weirdly-sad-because-you've-lived-this? dreamscape of anthropomorphic anti-Neoplatanism shouts images of violent tenderness that demand Buddha-like absorption and tree-scaling adaptation. As in, "depth." As in, burrowing into the bowels of a lady who lives at the bottom of a cistern might require some special skills. As in caring about something might require eating it. As in, duh.

3. We've all felt like a severed head trapped in a bear's belly trying (with great difficulty) to make an important point to another severed head trapped in the gastrointestinal tract of a different bear who's lumbering around the same backyard. We just didn't know it 'til now.

4. The cruel and continuous torture and subjugation of rats (especially some nifty little harnesses that "squeeze their bodies too tightly, puncturing fur and skin, digging into muscles, yielding only to bone."). Yeah, I know the book's a fable and the rats in it are sort of unfortunate and defenseless pawns relegated to the wreckage of the narrator and poisonhorse's chaotic relationship but last night an actual rat with a tail as thick as a middle finger ran giddily across my shoe as I walked out of my building and I fucking hate them.

5. This:

"If my poisonhorse is a child, we are all children. If we are all children, we are horses. If we are truly horses, we must be made of poison. If our insides are acidic, rotting lumps pressed together and expanding, then we will never have the capacity to love. We are created without the necessary hollows inside and if there are accidentally hollows in us, we fill them with other things before love can take root, swell, inflate, inhabit, control. Because we are aware that love must be crushed. Eradicated."

http://mudlusciouspress.com/nephew/

Poisonhorse by Brandi Wells
a nephew of Mud Luscious Press
August 2012
34 pages