Women of Visual Poetry Issue of The Volta

Jessica Smith edited a beautiful collection of visual poetry for this month's Volta. Check it out!

here is a link to my piece.

FUR BIRDS runner up in Sawtooth Prize, will be published by Ahsahta in March 2015!!!

I am so so so happy!

https://ahsahtapress.org/open-selection-and-sawtooth-runner-up/

poems that I've read recently and loved

this awesome collaboration with Erica Lewis and Mark Stephen Finein
Tuesday poem #18 : Pattie McCarthy : sonnets 28, 29, & 30 from x y z & &

Anne Boyer's Money City Sick As Fuck

all of Ash Smith's nanowrimopoems and especially this one

Jessica Smith's bird/memory poems at Tsk

everything by C.S. Giscombe; here's a fox 

these Claire Hero poems from Sing, Mongrel

fevers

something I want to fix it's impossible deep in the body where I can't see it like the marrow of a nervousness a fringe just touching just barely the body is so soft and pliable I feel it creaking the slackening and unslackening of my limbs I forget myself forget to bring the body its getting so old so heavy I shouldn't complain no don't let them hear you even your inner monologues should be edited what if someone hears you its like making a wish for satan to come and visit to pull back the covers and oh look your body is perfect your body is because it works don't think anything unless you wish it to happen your corruption is showing already you are ruining everything it would be better if we could all just go back to sleep

love for CJ Martin and Julia Drescher

http://loveforcjmartinandjuliadrescher.tumblr.com/

Gloria (for Elizabeth Treadwell)

Gloria, go back to the beginning:
Gloria, in the woods, we're safe:
Gloria, who knows how to listen.



   The dream-glass breaks, black with tar, spit, and glitter

                                ash and grass drifting together

          a deer, a fox : : : the bee-buzz bird-saw

                                  drone and thrum


                       let it call you:        Gloria.
                             let it call you:          Home.

News

I have coco-fresh poems in the ever-awesome Coconut!

The Poetry Booth will be popping up around town this month. First stop, Paseo Nuevo courtyard this Thursday (April 4th) in downtown SB

Feral Poetics

Reflecting on the ecopoetics conference. Lots to sift through and think about. Thought I would share my abstract here. I'm already thinking of ways to amend and refine the ways I would describe a feral poetics, so consider this a work in progress.

Troubling the Field: Feral Poetics, Feminism, and the Politics of the Anti-Pastoral

Representations of nature and creaturely life, both in poetry and in the language of
environmentalism, remain haunted by the pastoral tradition. As a feminist, I am often concerned by the tacit acceptance of a pastoral frame in writing about nature. In my work as a writer and reader, I have experimented with a feral poetics as way to trouble pastoralism’s duplicitous and highly gendered fantasies of nature as "wild," “pure,” “unpopulated,” and outside of historical and political time. A feral poetics destabilizes these fantasies, and feral texts articulate and recover the subjects otherwise contained or made invisible by pastoralism’s narratives of nature, nation, state, and species.

In this presentation––part of a continuing project that meditates upon the politics of interspecies affiliations, affinities, and alliances––I outline the contours of a feral poetics, situating it as both an aesthetic and scholarly project of refusing/resisting pastoralism, recalling that pastorlism has often served as the warrant for settler colonialism, racism, and imperialism. In light of a feral poetics, writers, thinkers, and creatures as diverse as Bhanu Kapil, Claudia Rankine, Bernadette Mayer, Donna Haraway, Elizabeth Grosz, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Audre Lorde, Lorine Niedecker, Emily Dickinson, the feral ponies of Assateague Island and New Zealand’s celebrity ovine “Shrek” the sheep can be seen as co-conspirators in a common endeavor.

The Next Big Thing

I was tagged by Elizabeth Treadwell. She is awesome. She sent me a copy of Virginia or the mud flap girl and it is awesome. I am supposed to send her a copy of my book in return. Even though I don't have a published full-length collection. I will probably send her some chapbooks and a valentine if I can get to the post office soon.

THE NEXT BIG THING

1. What is the working title of the book? 

I've been working on something called Fur Birds for about 3 years. It has multiple manifestations, including two chapbooks (one by Dusie and one in the Parrot series for Insert Press) and 3-d book arts assemblage stuff.

Right now, I have a 105 page manuscript with three sections: Fur Birds, Havens, and Notes from the Land of Hurt Feelings


2. Where did the idea come from for the book? 

It came from the mess of glass and glitter that is the sort of the flotsam and jetsam of the broken and brakish swampland of  nostalgia and other fantastical longings. A longing for an unlearning that might take me back to creatures. A longing for dirt.  A weaving through an affective geography that effectively maps states of emotional intensity without losing too much to narrative or conventional rules of grammar, syntax, and other linguistic forms.

 3. What genre does your book fall under? 

Poetry. Mysticism. Cozy Catastrophe.

 4. What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition? 

It would be a way of looking at people and things and not so much about the actors.

 5. What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

Time is with the animal. It has a politics.

 6. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript? 

This is difficult for me to answer because my writing process is closest to that of a compost heap.

 7. Who or what inspired you to write this book? 

Living in this world. Animals. Capitalism. Spending a lot of time in the South Carolina woods when I was a teenager.

 8. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest? 

The narrator(s) may or may not be human.


 9. Who is publishing your book?

I don't know.


tagging Julia Drescher, CJ Martin,  gillian devereux, katy henrickson, harold abromowwitz, amanda ackerman, matt timmons.

the shadow self is but a shadow

but the doubleself is help. I've let the one slip inside another, hoping for a respite. Today, I've taken to my bed. All this wondering about being ill, all this...hoping for an explanation. I'm letting myself sleep as much as I want, and it is ... a lot. hours upon hours. I have no desire to go outside. yes the sun is lovely and I notice the bees now at the lavender and the birds trilling in the hedges, but it's like looking at everything through a window -- this fatigue. I write but the letters look alternately like bones harvested from an owl pellet or temperamental metal filings arranging and rearranging themselves around frenetic and rhizomatic poles. I can't help thinking "who cares?"

I'm not telling anyone, except myself, in a code I'll call latin, though most of the vernacular is language I've stolen from the dog. I cannot take credit for it.