Poets "Open Mic" for Peace | 100 TPC Santa Barbara 2017 Event

link to event page on facebook

a pause at the end of the year

It's true years are fictions of time, but only kind of. Because we are on a rock orbiting a star and that takes a certain amount of time. Markers are where we confront our role as namers. We don't make time; we notice light and dark. Our bodies are made of time: earth. The sun goes "up" and "down." We sleep and dream. Flowers say hello. The birds migrate. We change.

The ecosystem of a life changes, too. I've been in a new climate. There was sheltering in place so inside great sheets of ice could begin a sort of slippage. Shores emerged. It was very painful at times. I am very strong.

Since last posting, some things with the writing and poetry have helped keep me on the earth. Not washed away to the stars where it is good to go, but I worry -- what if I get lost and can't make it back? This year writing has been a tether to the terrestrial. I will not float away.

People read and wrote about After-Cave. Receiving this type of attention and love is such a gift.

• Review of After-Cave at Tarpaulin Sky by Nathan Hauke

• Review of After-Cave at Quaterly West by Brenda Sieczkowski

• Review of After-Cave at Mary Journal by Sarah Burant 

I also published some pieces that are very important to me.

"Field Notes on the Metafur", an essay on interspecies communication and feral poetics at Entropy. This is an expanded version of the talk I gave at Open Press in October. 

 I also was the featured writer for December at the excellent Aspasiology. I also published some poems there in response to Feng Sun Chen's study earlier in the year.

My chapbook, The Primitive Undreamed, was published as part of the 8th Dusie chapbook kollektiv, edited by the tireless and generous Rob McLennan. The Primitive Undreamed is an excerpt from  Sin in Wilderness.

I contributed to the super-cool epic poem BirdWolf at Entropy. 

I also published a poem "United States of Grief," at the 2016 Dusie Advent Calendar. 

Life is change. Sending Love: Michelle

• 
  

New Review of After-Cave in Kenyon Review Online & 3 chapters from Sin in Wilderness in YEW

Many thanks to M.P. Jones IV for this beautiful new review of After-Cave in the Kenyon Review Online.

& thanks to YEW journal for publishing 3 chapters from Sin in Wilderness. Here is one of the chapters, "The Way."

also, here are some picture of some borage that I planted -- first in February, and then in April

MAYDAY

The sky shifted its weight towards the horizon
and the masts of sailboats slipped under
the slouch.
I went to honey bloom
& I fed the wings to an imaginary star.
Could you meet me there? on the star?

In this after-life, I wear something other than my body:
a clear dress with all my organs
swimming where you can see.
We scraped away what was awful
and tried to cling to what was left
with our soft teeth and belligerent questions.

That type of dusk in the suburbs —
it hurts your chest, doesn’t it?

You need to walk home now, but it
is so far away. You should have figured
out the bus schedule. Can you let me know
if you see me in the future? Am I okay?

I feel confused about how to handle
the current weather. It comes down like the crux
of a lever. The insides of a pelican shudder
and love letters fall out. We gather them up
and hold them to our lips. They smell like sun
and roses. Remember? this is how beautiful
and simple our insides are? It’s, like, not even
that hard to make up.

published last May at enclave as part of #finalpoem series: http://enclave.entropymag.org/finalpoem-from-michelle-detorie/

Solstice | 2015

Longest night of the year and I am grateful for these poetry encounters that have occurred since I last posted. 

POEMS

"Heartsleight" at Delirious Hem

"Fable," "Acultomancy," & "Witch Dog" at Luna Luna

"Mutual Centaur" & "Hereditament" at Typo

"Their Days Are Numbered" at Entropy

"See? Monsters." at Gorgon Poetics

"Mayday" & "Cave Gifts" at Enclave

"This Summer it Rained Feathers" in ATTN for FOBW

"Dirty Clocks" & "You know that one time we did that thing without dying" in Prism Review

"Patterns" & "Flock" in Rare Feather: Poems on Birds and Art

REVIEWS & INTERVIEWS

Review of After-Cave by Amish Trivedi in Sink Review

Interview with Genevieve Kaplan in Prism Review

Review of After-Cave by Lauren Bull at Front Porch

IRL Encounters

ASLE Conference in Moscow, ID

Nathan's Post | Linda's Posts @ Jacket2 (1) (2)

Open Press

Beast Crawl

The world is so fucked up and weird, but more and more it is easier to see. That gives me hope. and fire. and the love to stand up. Feral hope. 

hearts

time

okay I'm going to blog for a minute like it is 2005.

my relationship to time feels very peculiar and this has always been true but somehow always feels new somehow as if it is different suddenly. as if at some point in the past I had a relationship with time that felt pedestrian and knowable. I do feel disappointed with myself for not having more discipline re: slowing down and noticing things, but also fuck that noise because there is plenty of guilt to go around already.

but I also feel full of despair and full of hope simultaneously. saying things directly and plainly takes some warming up, but saying them in poems feels better and closer. but now I'm just going to try and type a bunch of informative sentences that hopefully will not be too boring. because I want to remember things. especially things that make me feel good/less alone/happy.

I am very excited that Juliet Cook, whose poetics and general way of being a poet in the world I've admired for awhile, wrote this glitter-guts review of After-Cave. I met Juliet briefly in Minneapolis, and in person she is very sparkly and sweet.

& I'm really glad that I went to Minneapolis. I pretended I was a bit of plankton and just went where I went. I got to spend some QT with two of my BFFs -- Amanda Ackerman & Jessica Smith. Both Amanda and Jessica have new books out and they are amazing. I also finally got to meet Gillian Devereux  IRL, and I immediately found her presence so warm and comforting, so as far as I'm concerned we are bonded for life. I also finally met Amish Trivedi whose dry wit & friendly charm made me feel relaxed and like maybe the world isn't so terrible. Amish also has a new book out and if you don't already have it you should because it is good.

I also did some readings in Minneapolis and that was fun. I still kinda feel like I go into a trancey place when I read, even if I'm nervous, but that nervousness definitely makes my reading faster. so there is time again. because up there reading it feels slow, but Amish took some video and watching it back I can see/hear/feel its speed. In some parts of the book, the speaker is speaking really fast. but in other places, it is more measured with lots of silences and breaks.

The best part of doing readings is meeting other poets and hearing them read.  Or hearing people I love read again. Like I love Harold Abramowitz and Teresa Carmody and so it is always good to hear them read. Unfortunately I had to leave the Insert/Wonder/Les Figues reading before I could hear Matt Timmons and Amanda and all the other rad poets at that event read because that Ahsahta reading was the same night. Then at the Ahsahta reading I got to hear Mary Hickman, Susan Tichy, Aaron Apps, Cody-Rose Clevidence, and TC Tolbert read. I got all swoony for all of them. Also wonderful to meet Janet Holmes at last who I will love forever no matter what because I think it is like a biological rule that you imprint on whoever publishes your first book. Plus Janet is wonderful and so smart and spirited.

with Cody-Rose Clevidence at Ahsahta table. Photo by Janet Holmes. Have you read Beast Feast yet? so good.

It was also fun to connect with the folks from Entropy. Janice Lee is a force of nature and has cultivated such a great community through Entropy and Enclave. She gave me an Entropy t-shirt which is black and that is important because that is the best color for collecting dog fur. & I always feel best when I'm wearing some dog fur.

also, I feel like I should say this somewhere; you have to read Jennifer Tamayo. Now. Go read her.

are you reading her yet?

& like the best thing that has ever happened to me in my whole life is that Bhanu called After-Cave the "best feral lyric" of 2014. 

what I'm reading rn

& so there have been a lot of things that have made me feel happy lately, but also things are still really fucked up. The deaths of Freddie Gray and Walter Scott -- these lynchings happening in broad daylight by the hands of the state -- confirm that there can really be no unslackening of attention to projects of resistance and intervention. Of all kinds. Sometimes making poems feels like the silliest thing, but other times it feels like coming up for air when everything else is poison.

approaching the equinox

1. Talking about erasure w/ Gillian Devereux The Women in Visual Poetry: the Bechdel Test
Curated by Jessica Smith; with Michelle Detorie, Gillian Devereux, Kathy Ernst, K. Lorraine Graham and Sheila Murphy & an afterword by Maureen Thorson

 2. “The Meat World,” “Solstice,” and “Blink Witch” + “Other” (chapter from Sin in Wilderness) + vintage video

 3. Reading at What's New in Poetry @ Real Pants

 4. After-Cake

5. Readings and stuff

Another review, New Poem, & After-Cave on December SPD Poetry Bestsellers list!

Rob McLennan wrote a thoughtful review of After-Cave 

My poem "The River" (an erasure from the book-length erasure The Sin in Wilderness) is in the wonderful new issue of 17seconds

&

I'm so excited that After-Cave in on the December SPD Poetry Bestsellers list!

also, I'm *so* into this customer review of After-Cave posted on Amazon.

Two Reviews and an Interview

TWO new reviews in the latest issue of GALATEA RESURRECTS (#23)JOHN BLOOMBERG-RISSMAN ReviewsAfter-Cave by Michelle Detorie(Ahsahta Press, Boise, ID, 2014)&EILEEN TABIOS EngagesAFTER-CAVE by Michelle Detorie
(Ahsahta Press, Boisie, ID, 2014)&A new interview at American Microreviews & InterviewsINTERVIEW WITH MICHELLE DETORIE, AUTHOR OF  AFTER-CAVE INTERVIEW WITH KALLIE FALANDAYS

AFTER-CAVE by MICHELLE DETORIE (1)

AFTER CAVE by MICHELLE DETORIE (2)

Fall Things

1. audio from my reading at Indian Springs School. I was very inspired by my visit to ISS, and was especially heartened to encounter the vibrant and engaged curriculum developed by poets Jessica Smith and Douglas Ray. Also, Heidi Lynn Staples is awesome. So fun to read with her. Audio of her reading is here.

2. My poem "Pine Needles" is day two at the Delirious Hem Advent calendar.

3. Janice Lee included After-Cave in her list of "Best Books of 2014" at The Volta.

4. Speaking of Janice, I am now the poetry editor at the super-rad Entropy.

5. I did this interview over at Rob's blog.

6. I'll be joining CJ Martin, Julia Drescher, and Kurt Newman for a panel on "Paranoid Histories" at the Bay Area Public School on Saturday, January 10th.

7. I was "featured" at the TX State English department alumni page.

8. The entire first chapter of The Sin in Wilderness is included in the October 2014 issue of MiPOesias (edited by Emma Trelles).

9. I read at the Mission Poetry series in Santa Barbara, the Rhapsodomancy reading series in LA, and participated with Michalle Gould in one of the excellent #90for90 events hosted by DTLAB.

10. More readings TBA!

11. Copies of After-Cave may be purchased online at the Ahsahta Press website, Small Press Distribution, Powell's, & Amazon. If you are in Santa Barbara, you can purchase a copy at Chaucer's, Granada, or DNA design and art. If you are in Los Angeles, you may get one at Skylight Books. If you are in Brooklyn, you may get one at Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop.

12. I also have a website now.

SPD recommends After-Cave!

http://www.spdbooks.org/Products/List/53/Lister.aspx

After-Cave at SPD

http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781934103548/aftercave.aspx

After-Cave germinates in a space that is desolate and dangerous. It invites the reader to nestle in the narrator’s skin as a movement towards livability is recorded. The words collect on the speaker’s dermis, galvanically; groggily we awake in the eyes of a girl, fifteen, perhaps animal and perhaps human, maybe alive and possibly dead. A hybrid text, After-Cave contains poems and fragments, sentences and paragraphs, experiments in sound and syntax, as well as visual poetry and cartographies. Language moves over the speaker like weather systems and migratory birds, troubling notions of linear time and traversing the spaces of human-made and "natural" disaster. More pressing than hunger is the need to know what “cruelty” means and how one might live in its absence, a series of torsions that displace us from a surface and convey us to its underside, which is to say that After-Cave is a book about the impossible.  How to make the impossible hospitable, and thereby, in one’s way, to prepare oneself to meet one’s friends: human, animal, the always alive and the already-dead. A feminist, feral-poetic odyssey, purring and covered in mud. The words pace themselves on cave time. The better to welcome an encounter that changes us as we wish to be changed.

I got reviewed!!!

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-934103-54-8

Detorie extracts a poetics "against dying" out of a landscape of ruin and wilderness in this spirited full-length debut. The book comprises three long sequences concerning questions of shelter, destruction, and agency, which, though formally mercurial, remain linked through a single speaker who describes herself as "15. Female. Human (I think)." Materiality becomes a place of confluence for the bodily and the external universe, the man-made and the feral: "we are skin, snow, unpacked/ boxes opened like petals, skin// ... I held a line, a pail, my pockets/ becoming full, the moon/ blood red and lined with fur." The poems remain grounded in the subjective "I" but resist a linear sense of time, leading instead by sensation and image, and sometimes using formatting and typography to invite the reader into an unconventional experience of text, page, and physical book. This sense of play is punctuated by moments of direct assertion. "To insist that something—someone or some being—cannot be imagined is, in fact, its own form of oppression," Detorie writes. Indeed, her poetics struggles against such insistence in service of possibility. Where "The failure to occupy/ breaks apart like soap/ sand salt all/ the things we need/ to name," Detorie wrests a vocabulary of compassion. (Sept.)

After-Cave!!!!!

https://ahsahtapress.org/product/after-cave/ After-Cave
 Michelle Detorie

 After-Cave is the narration of “an adolescent female who may or may not be human,” an odyssey feral, feminist, and ecopoetical. More pressing than hunger for this speaker is the need to know what “cruelty” means and how one might live in its absence. In this way,After-Cave is a book about the impossible and how to make it hospitable, and thereby prepare oneself to meet one’s friends: human, animal, the always alive and the already dead. Using language that moves over the speaker like weather systems and migratory birds, troubling notions of linear time and traversing the spaces of human-made and “natural” disaster, Detorie in this first book introduces us to the distinction between a state of being and an act of being.

“Michelle Detorie betrays the false presumptions of our times to vivify and reinhabit the very spaces they have denied and marred. However ‘marred’ is language already discarded here. Without old-fashioned judgment, she sets us inside her testimony, which is a scored preamble, an alchemical cartography, girl-spirited and dense with data, all-atune. The book’s dystopian ferocity and knowledge make its bearings even as it trembles with a deep and feral hope. Hers is the tenderest, the most specific report.” —Elizabeth Treadwell .

“Like Helen Adam before her, Detorie sings this afterlife-life, often via attention to noise, meaning that ‘voice’ here picks up some unnatural instruments: ‘Tumbleweeds or / teeth? [ . . . ] Fur / for a mouth.’ I make my way through After-Cave as I’d enter a woods where ‘the trees have decided to grow underground’—certain that finding my feet will involve a death to one nature or another. In this kind of apocalypse, it’s the ideology of ‘the natural’ that’s haunting the house—not any actual fact of organisms. Or (if you like ghosts) maybe it’s the natural’s propensity for systematic violence that leaves us with such fiery spectral lives.” —C.J. Martin .

“Michelle Detorie writes through the animal to reach another place; there, we encounter ‘reluctance,’ ‘kindness,’ trailing ‘ribbons.’ I was very moved by the link Detorie makes between feral life and the ecology of shelter. As she writes: ‘Digging underground, I disrupted homes that did not belong to me but wound deep and tethered together.’ How this profound non-belonging is in relation, always, to the sensation of touch when it comes; touch that in After-Cave precipitates encounter, like the stages of soft palate growth and experiment that precede language: ‘Your hand like a little lock reached through—.’ What a tender and complicated book for someone to write. A book that is ‘silky, frayed, gleaming: a continuance.’ A book that hurts a little bit to read. A book saturated in the kind of longing a girl might typically not admit; a desire, in other words, that starts to change the outline of the body: ‘my glass jaw bobbing.’ The intensity also lies in the way Detorie takes us close to what is not us and what will change us to be with in another way, across the species frame: ‘I thought of taking off my clothes and sleeping with the wolf.’ Communal, imaginal, soft—the book goes on and takes us further in, until we reach the ‘meadows still blue with the asphalt glitter that rained down.’ And get to go. And get to lie down.”
—Bhanu Kapil

Last day of April

This morning I encountered a creature digging a heart-shaped hole.

A poem from The Sin in Wilderness is up at Newport Life Magazine.

Some Happy Things are sparkling I love you hello

Hi!

I was on the radio. You can listen here: http://www.kcsb.org/blog/2014/04/23/poet-michelle-detorie-erasing-words-discovering-magic-april-15-2014/
Thank you Chryss Yost and Amy Boutell for having me.

My "Notes Towards A Feral Poetics" essay is included in this omg awesome beautiful collection from eohippus labs http://eohippuslabs.com/8/stealth
Thank you Andrea Quaid, Juliana Leslie, Amanda Ackerman, and Harold Abramowitz for this beautiful work.

I was just up in the Bay Area for to read at Lark Reading Series at Studio Grand. Many thanks to the enchanting Elizabeth Treadwell for having me.

I'm going to be doing some poetry booth stuff soon. Come make a poem with us.

xoxoxoxoxo

Feral Thing Tinyside (2006) now available for digital consumption

Hey, there.

My "tinyside" (like a broadside, but tiny), Feral Thing, is now available as a pdf from Maureen Thorson's Big Game Books. & just look at all those beautiful covers! Maureen is not only an amazing poet and publisher, but a truly gifted designer. I feel lucky to have a number of these tinysides, as they are truly wonderful objects to look at and touch.

Writers' Cafe Radio Interview (January 7, 2014)

november erasures | from _the sin in wilderness_

erasures made from pages of The Singing Wilderness, by Sigurd Olson