WAITING UP FOR THE END OF THE WORLD is available!!!

The new book can be found here... deeply discounted for the moment! I highly recommend the color; I have been carrying around a copy myself and fondling the pages nonstop since I got my copy! (Though I am a little biased...)

Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), the newest collection of poetry from Elizabeth J. Colen examines 20th / 21st century conspiracy theories from a poetic standpoint. Taking road trips around the globe from New York City, Dallas, Atlanta, Georgia, and Gakona, Alaska to Area 51, Lockerbie, Scotland, London, Paris, and Indonesia, Colen visits the sites of alleged secret plans and alliances and their sometimes cataclysmic outcomes, investigating through verse such topics as black helicopters, chemtrails, the North American Union, the fluoride conspiracy, and the JFK assassination, and exploring possible links between government and corporate corruption and the on-the-ground results of continued global overconsumption.

http://jadedibisproductions.com/PREORDER.html


Hope y'all are staying safe out there in the east, my friends.

September 19

Happy birthday, brother. I hope you're well and happy in all things wherever you are.

Distance makes the heart grow

From Yoko Tawada's "The Art of Being Nonsynchronous":

Before digital technologies became a part of everyday life, the letter was considered one of the most important instruments for the transport of words. Even the telephone was unable to destroy the culture of letter writing. People who before had frequently written letters continued to do so to communicate things they preferred not to say on the telephone. The letter has developed its own for of distance that allows people to express things it might be difficult to say in person. This has less to do with inhibitions or politeness than with style. Writing a letter, you can borrow this or that turn of phrase from literary tradition to apply to your own life much more easily than on the phone. It wasn't until the advent of electronic communication that the culture of letter writing began to lose some of its dominance. There are many differences between an email and a letter on paper, but one in particular stands out, namely, the consciousness on the part of both sender and recipient of the distance between them. Even in the case of an overseas email, people tend to expect a response in the next few hours, as if the recipient's desk were in the same room. Mentioning the time difference or weather in an international email can already be interpreted as a personal, even romantic gesture. A handwritten letter, however, almost automatically announces the writer's absence to its recipient. 

Spork

A few days ago, this went live: http://sporkpress.com/fiction/?p=951 - a few more prose poems from What Weaponry.

Almost everything I have ever read at Spork Press I have loved; today I read this: http://sporkpress.com/fiction/?p=794 - Knots by Sam Ramos. It is beautiful. This is from that:

It is the longing for a moment free from time and its cold meter. It is the pained desire for a place with no loss.

The Slim Beauty Knot ties down all things wanted and loved so they will never be missed.

Trains, Strange, and Branches

In two weeks the travel starts. Me on a train. Me at my aunt's wedding in Monmouth, then me on a train for a day and a half, a two-hour layover in LA's Union Station, then another two days on the train, this time with lie-down and feed-me accommodations (as in, I got a room). I get a room when I go to Kansas because the train ride ends for me at 3am. Then I get to hope my rental car is waiting there in the station dark, parked someplace I can find, key handed to me by the disinterested party of the station attendant (after all his other chores of off-loading and loading passengers is done). The last time I waited 25 minutes in the blue station light, watching the child's-fist-sized flying midwestern bugs beat themselves senseless against the overlarge lights on the platform outside. 

I get the keys and I drive for an hour and a half. I hope my grandfather has left the door unlocked. Otherwise I look for the key, if I remember he keeps one hidden outside. I will get to his house at 5am. If I can't get in I go to the all night Walmart and try on sunglasses and drink chocolate milk and sit under a light in the parking lot where fist-sized bugs beat themselves 20 feet above me. I read a book or I nap. I hope the right people travel through the parking lot, if any travel through at all. I am afraid of small towns in the middle of the night. I am right to do so. I grew up in a small town. I grew up gay in a small town. I am right to be nervous. 

But nothing has ever happened to me there. My grandfather's town feels good to me. I get to his house a few hours later when I know he is up and drinking decaf and reading the morning paper if the morning paper has found its way inside to him. Now he is less mobile though, and no longer takes the paper; he told me last week. What I will do without the crossword and sudoku and jumble, I do not know. What I will do without the local news to educate me on their ways. I will eye the big bottle of bourbon too early. I will talk about the ice road truckers. I will show pictures of my dog. I will listen to him breathe, and listen to his oxygen machine breathe. I will wish things had been different, and that I had known him for more than just these past several years. He's a good guy. Interesting and smart. And so am I. We get along. Laugh at the same things, vote the same way. We think the same women are beautiful usually.

My parents separated when I was five. And it was ugly. And then none of us lived in Kansas anymore. And everyone hated everyone. And I saw my grandparents when I was ten and then never again. Until I made it happen when I was 27. My grandmother died a month later. Now I go back every year.

This isn't what I meant to talk about.

I meant to say what I was reading. Partly in preparation for the journey. 

I just finished reading Michael Newton's Savage Girls and Wild Boys and am typing up notes. (An odd relation: I get off the train in Newton, KS.) I am reading Andrew Zawacki's Anabranch. Slowly, the way I read things that are good. Things that stun me. 

From the page I am on, this...

14

Nor were we immune to such evolve and overwhelm. A diminishing match the frontier of unbreaking, we vexed oscura to spark, hearing it inhabit a new constellation: neither the sisters who cluster for beauty nor Sirius in a bid for omnipotence, but wax flower and ironbark, plainchant of a diesel engine coruscating rock at the edge of across. Where--razorwire spiraled to prevel the dead from defecting, or ghosts from insinuating when least required--a flood lamp broiled the salt flats torn from a page too charred to read, as we wagered who the photographer was, cutting our hearts on the hours until sunrise, on anything not expired. The soul opting out through its second-hand lens: the eye that eroded from lexis to shadow, azure by estrange, or the eye beset by a looking-glass inlet, a mile ago dark but now dazzling.

Odd how well that random grab fits with this post. It's such a good book.

And this, I read today by Anna Journey: http://atlengthmag.com/prose/strange-merchants/

In either scenario, a stranger flees in mortal fear through an exit. 

and

In the classic anthropological text, The Stranger (1908), German sociologist Georg Simmel articulates his concept of a unique sociological form. A “peculiar tension” arises, Simmel suggests, from “the stranger,” who manages to be both close to and remote from us at once. The value of such figures in society, then, stems from the strangers’ “objectivity.” Because they aren’t intimately connected with our lives, we feel freer to confess to them our secrets. In pre-modern societies, Simmel writes, most strangers within a group made their living as traders or tradesman, those “‘strange’ merchants” who move closely among us in a crowd, performing necessary tasks, even as they remain enigmatic.

I have more to say, but no time to say it. The dog deserves a walk. 

creeping, four-footed

The dog is kicking in her sleep, taking up four fifths of the sofa. I am slouched in my one-fifth, getting kicked, too lazytired to get up and finish my hurtheavy eyes into sleep. I wrote another poem tonight, but I'm not sure if I like it. Something in me is getting into the plain speech of things and relying more on repetition. I am not used to this. I also use "empire" in the poem, personified, well house-ified, it's a house in the poem. And I want to use a different word because "empire" is overused. This whole century so far it's a little darling of a word and I've used it too. In this poem it is repeated too many times. There are also monkeys. 

Photo courtesy of http://3scape.com

Tonight I am reading a few things, of them Anne Boyer's My Common Heart. This is from that:

TWO CITIES

Two cities have been formed by two loves. The one seeks sustenance, shelter, and the maintenance of objects and environments, but the greatest glory of the other is when the one lifts up its head in its own glory and says "hey" to the other and then the other says to the other "hey." Also when the two cities, earthly and ideal, say to one another "hey, you other city, you are really my glory, and the lifter up of mine head." In the one, all the princes, kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, bosses, and the nations they subdue are ruled by the love of saying "hey" to the other; in the other, the princes and the subjects shout in the middle of the square about ruling and love and some citizens take dictation. The one delights in its own strength, represented in the armies, defense contractors, urban planners, and banking systems; the other says, "hey, I will love thee, the other city, with my strength, too." And this love is reciprocated! And the two cites are in love! And therefore the wise men and women of the one city, living according to love, have sought the profit of their own bodies or souls, or both, and those who have known the ideal city and the earthly city also became their imaginations and in becoming this became the glory of incorruptible everything and they became together birds and they become together pilgrims and they become together four-footed beasts and they become together creeping things.

the in-betweens

I recently read Srikanth Reddy's Facts for Visitors, and also Voyager. Which I really enjoyed. And read another book I didn't really care for, that I won't bother to name, although it too was interesting to look at in order to further understand what it is poets are doing when they cross the border between lineated and prose poems, why they make the decisions they make to break or not to break. I have a stack of books and I'm working through them. Because, really, there's not much else going on. And because I want to get as far on my critical thesis as possible before fall. Before late summer travel really. 


Today I read the first of two Barbara Jane Reyes books I will read. Poeta en San Francisco. In it I found the sounds to be a mixed bag of stunning and lackluster. Sounds to be the first stick by which I measure any writing, of course. Leaving that aside, the project of the book and the execution of it is incredibly powerful. A look at war. And war culture. About that I am still thinking / not yet in a position to comment on. 


From the book I will share an excerpt of a poem, which I am rudely taking out of context, but which (out of context) moved me today. Because it's where I am. The second I will include whole-cloth.




--




(from one of the epistolary prose poetry parts... p 92)



there are times that missing you is a matter of procedure. now is not one of those times. there are times when missing you hurts. so it comes to this, vying for geography. there is a prayer stuck in my throat. douse me in gasoline, my love, and strike a match.




-




[agimat kinabukasan]


one day she will build a temple from detritus, dust of your crumbling empires’ edicts; its walls will hold with blood and spittle, brackish water and sun-dried grasses. within these walls she will inscribe her own terms of worship, upon every pillar and column, glyphs resembling earth and ocean. once she had no sharpened stone, no reason for stone, for once the wind bore her words upon its entire wingspan. carved into bamboo, banana leaf, her river poems, her birdsong.


you came then, with your devices, and you will come again, believing yourself to be some cipher, some illuminati, plunder-hungry in secrecy. she will not appease you, but with the fire you once took to her flesh, she will melt down your weapons, forge her own gods, and adorn her own body.


it is for no glory, no father, no doctrine. as it was in the beginning, so shall it be again. in plumes of ash blanketing sky, the land expels that with which she was poisoned. 

Poetry is a Form of Substance Abuse

BENZENE

by Donald Revell

It is the right time for hallucinations.

Drowning in a sty, the sailor

feels the ocean’s buoyancy.

Dying in a web, the moth

discards its wings and falls free.

I wish something would put its hands on me,

give me stronger poison and then stronger.

The beautiful flotillas do not stop.

Undying love drifts and delays.

I am capsizing.

Great joy lingers still.

Nothing can be said for suffering.

It is legible only to strangers

and at great distances. It detests

survivors. It drapes gun-carriages

with flowers, lampposts with hanging boys.

It is the right time for hallucinations,

most nakedly of inmost west.

Her death would be less tender now,

dusted over with charity,

a web of useless wings, a shallow sty.

She gave me stronger poison and then stronger.

I miss her.

In the back seat of the taxi,

dark breathlessness says “Hurry, hurry.”

--

This is my favorite thing I've read lately. Though I also liked all of Rachel Zucker's Museum of Accidents as well. What I feel is an honest view of motherhood and relationships. I feel like I was so shocked by her honesty that I actually read the poems for content. Something I rarely do, or rarely do at first. I will need to read again for sound, which is the important thing. Also to see how she incorporates prose blocks within some poems (what I'm interested in now, how poets move back and forth between blocks and lineation). 

Anyway, Revell. Here is a link to the Poetry Foundation site that also includes audio of Revell reading Benzene: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181207

Spring - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Nothing is so beautiful as spring--

  When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;

  Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush

Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring

The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;

  The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush

  The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush

With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy?

  A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning

In Eden garden. --Have, get, before it cloy,

  Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,

Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,

Most, O maid's child, they choice and worthy the winning.

a little bit more Schuyler

So what happened is this. I have a notebook where I keep things I like from things I've read. I mean I have many notebooks. I fill one every couple of years. I can't find the most recent one where I put things, so for now I will put things here. That will solve my current indexing issues. But there is something inherently satisfying about writing out by hand the things I love. There is an intimacy to physically forming the words that is not replicated in the experience of typing.

Or maybe I just like hand cramps.

This is the rest of what I loved from James Schuyler's The Home Book.

The second of "Two Meditations" - there is something magical that happens when Schulyer boxes words into prose poems. Through compression that one doesn't generally get in his lineated poems (perhaps this is a natural inclination in prose poetry? toward compression?), the words push and shove at each other, the sounds explode. At least this is my experience.

From "Two Meditations"

Out of the gray bay gray rocks, close spaced and each a little black green north tree forest. This became denser until it was the color of a hole. The trawler anchored and they scrambled ashore in an inlet closed by a little white sand beach like a Negro's very white palm, the guide experienced and dignified last in laced boots with moccasin bottoms. The clarity of the water reelected a dead tree while he boiled great lake trout in a galvanized bucket on a resinous fire. A green flame. Everyone has planned to change his "way of life" until he tasted the fish, which was tasteless. Scales on the dull sand like garbage, or rain. It began raining, a drop at a time, big as cod liver oil capsules. The two boys' knees lichened and their shrills faded high and out into the falls of shot grouse curving into a November wet matchstick field. Burrs, unfinished houses.

Like that: ending on the parataxis of a two-item list... Burrs, unfinished houses. And the sentence before. (And not just for the use of the word "lichened.") The end seems that much more truncated by the volley of small (I would generally argue in poetry and for the sake of compression, unnecessary) words in the previous sentence. "The two boys' knees lichened and their shrills faded high and out into the falls of shot grouse curving into a November wet matchstick field." November wet matchstick field. Resinous fire. A green flame. The fish was tasteless. Out of the gray bay gray rocks. To say "gray waves" would be too much, but it's where the mind goes when presented with the triple rhyme, the mind bends naturally to the fourth slant rhyme. Or this mind does. I'm glad it didn't happen. In not happening, it happened anyway.

I should say this is a weirdly cohesive book for being a smattering of unpublished work (prose, poetry, prose poetry, drama even, a sonnet) from the 1950s and 60s.

From the title piece "The Home Book," which is unspecified prose.

"I know what troubles me. It is so simple: I don't want to give myself away. I don't want to confess, to say I am my history and it is mine, something I made, because as long as I don't I can pretend that I could change and become some other person I won't ever be. I don't want to give myself because to give is to lose and that is like dying; I don't want to lose any human love or pleasure through a deal with that which is invisible and by which I may gain nothing."

The speaker is talking about religion, but it strikes home pretty hard out of this context for me.

And then (from "Four Poems for Frank O'Hara"...

It's quarter of five

and the Fucking Tree has birds in its hair.

I wonder if I can claim influence after the fact. This happened while reading The Cantos also, that something was a nearly word-for-word echo of something in MFS.

(image "Fire Walk With Me" by Martin Wittfooth)

Jelly Jelly - James Schuyler

Summer apples, showy and sugary, mealy and touchy

a finger bruise on the thin skin

brown and silently reproachful as your wife's black eye.

But if September apples ripen

and the sun coats the sights with crinkling sheets

of cold while the waves come yapping

something about "wine dark"

evening primroses in clefts of rocks they lap

in a space labeled, "August 27th 1965

pay on demand," why then it is

September

when pebbles turn, shedding a summer snow

of salt, palely glowing in the first fall beaches.

The wind is pendant-breasted as a naked Swede.

A frosted fox grape shows where a bird shat as it ate.

Blackberry canes arch and obtrude big nipped.

And the chaste tree blooms.

Back before I made the egg test

I thought the world as flat and very like an elderberry umbel

crying "Hi!" and "Meet you in the jelly!"

or "Under the lid of an elderberry pie."

***

A prose section ("A Home Book") follows this poem. There is a lot of the beach, some of trees, no elderberry, no naked Swede. That here Schuyler possibly makes fun of the overwrought or overused "wine dark" becomes even more tongue-in-cheek when he uses a dark wine metaphor in this next section. Though the metaphor he uses, though a little hard to see--"The sun hit the sea like a cork slipping into a dark green bottle one-quarter full of wine"--is not one overused.

I started reading this book (The Home Book) last Sunday afternoon before heading out to see Eileen Myles read. It seemed an appropriate way to start a day of words, an appropriate connection. The cover of this book is horrible. Like a drawing I might have done of someone's father when I was in middle school. My apologies to the artist. Perhaps this is why I am unable to find a decent image to include here. But the book is lovely inside.

H.D. - from the Tribute to the Angels section of Trilogy

[13]

"What is that jewel color?"

green-white, opalescent,

with under-layer of changing blue,

with rose-vein; a white agate

with a pulse uncooled that beats yet,

faint blue-violet;

it lives, it breathes,

it gives off--fragrance?

I do not know what it gives,

a vibration that we can not name

for there is no name for it;

my patron said, "name it";

I said, I can not name it,

there is no name;

he said,

"invent it".

[14]

I can not invent it,

I said it was agate,

I said, it lived, it gave--

fragrance--was near enough

to explain that quality

for which there is no name;

I do not want to name it,

I want to watch its faint

heart-beat, pulse-beat

as it quivers, I do not want

to talk about it,

I want to minimize thought,

concentrate on it

till I shrink,

dematerialize

and am drawn into it.

-----

THIS is how I feel about poetry. It's okay. I can get into breaking it down, getting to Meaning. But generally I want to minimize thought, concentrate on it till I shrink, dematerialize and am drawn into it.

Dream Song 47: April Fool's Day, or, St Mary of Egypt

—Thass a funny title, Mr Bones.

—When down she saw her feet, sweet fish, on the threshold,
she considered her fair shoulders
and all them hundreds who have them, all
the more who to her mime thickened & maled
from the supple stage,

and seeing her feet, in a visit, side by side
paused on the sill of The Tomb, she shrank: 'No.
They are not worthy,
fondled by many' and rushed from The Crucified
back through her followers out of the city ho
across the suburbs, plucky

to dare my desert in her late daylight
of animals and sands. She fall prone.
Only wind whistled.
And forty-seven years with our caps on,
whom God has not visited.

(John Berryman)

CHORUS FOR ONE VOICE - Charles Simic

I'm going to lie down next to you.

It cannot grow colder than this hour.

Strange men are gathered again

Drinking and singing. A different young man

Sits in their midst dressed in a uniform.

We are well into the night. Black moon.

With candle and spoon they examine its mouth.

A man with dead soul and dog-licked knuckles

Eats from a paper plate.

I'm going to lie down next to you

As if nothing has happened:

Boot, shoemaker's knife, woman,

Your point bearing to my heart's true north.

*

This is a tale with a kernel.

You'll have to use your own teeth to crack it.

The Year that Was

So it was a pretty good year. Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake came out (in They Could No Longer Contain Themselves, which was #2 this Summer on SPD's best seller list). I did 17 readings. Which seems impossible to believe. But it was a busy, busy year in that way. The highlights were: reading at Good Luck Bar with Lidia Yuknavitch (I have to say, I am a little bit in love with her), reading at the QAF in Vancouver BC with Wayne Koestenbaum (I was totally geeked out to be reading with him, and was in the middle of one of the most horrible weeks of my life. The result of that reading was half a dozen people coming up to me after and telling me the reading made them cry. I did feel while I was reading that I had never read better, which felt good). The best reading was in Kansas though at Pages. The community I found there in Newton almost made me want to move there. Almost. The whole evening was just fantastic: the hosts, the turnout, my fellow readers, how the Q&A after turned more into a whole-audience conversation, then the porch drinking/talking until I had to leave for the train at 2am, just fantastic.

Last year I spent less time focused on getting stuff published, which was good for my sanity. That whole scrambling race is pretty tiring. I sent less individual pieces out and, once Conspiracies got picked up by Jaded Ibis Press in June, I quit sending the newer ms out as well. I spent more time revising it. I also spent some time making a few new poems for Conspiracies and reworking the stuff that I had initially cut to make it the palatable-sized <80-page ms (JI is happy to have it longer if it works that way). I traveled a lot. Focused inward on where I am in life and what I want. Which was good. Good to have some balance when the world out there doesn't always cooperate.

I am a little worried about getting everything done each week for the next three months. That is, getting everything done without getting an ulcer, having a breakdown, or becoming completely intolerable to the people around me. I woke this morning with a hot ball of stress riding high in my chest. I am working through the long to-do list I made at 3am.

I spent too much money last year, something I don't think will rectify this year. I read a lot, though sadly the quick clip slowed in Fall; I don't expect I'll read this much in 2012. Several were books I reread (The Book of Frank, Crush, Mule - which are three of my favorite books ever, btw). New to me favorites were probably: Reasons to Live - Amy Hempel, The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch, Bone Pagoda - Susan Tichy, The Madeleine Poems - Paul Legault, and A Natural History of the Senses - Diane Ackerman, which just had so much trivia for my brain to absorb.

1. Where We Think It Should Go – Claire Becker

2. Doctor Copernicus – John Banville

3. The Book of Frank – CA Conrad

4. The Irrationalist – Suzanne Buffam

5. Bobcat Country – Brandi Homan

6. The Book of Questions – Pablo Neruda

7. The History of Violets - Marosa di Giorgio

8. Octopus – Tom C. Hunley

9. The Planets – Dava Sobel

10. Accident – Nicholas Mosley

11. A Natural History of the Senses – Diane Ackerman

12. Crash Dome – Alex Phillips

13. The Country of Loneliness – Dawn Paul

14. Dayglo – James Meetze

15. Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrl Revolution – Sara Marcus

16. The Terror of Living – Urban Waite

17. Tocqueville – Khaled Mattawa

18. The Island of the Colorblind – Oliver Sacks

19. Black-Eyed Heifer – Shelly Taylor

20. Stalin in Aruba – Shelley Pahuk

21. Breaking the Map – Kim-An Lieberman

22. The Last Waltz in Santiago: And Other Poems of Exile and Disappearance – Ariel Dorfman

23. What Kind – Martha Zweig

24. Sasquatch Stories – Mike Topp

25. Coming Through Slaughter – Michael Ondaatje

26. Gallowglass – Susan Tichy

27. Models of the Universe: An Anthology of the Prose Poem – ed. Stuart Friebert & David Young

28. Nox – Anne Carson

29. A Moveable Feast – Earnest Hemingway

30. Hunter Mnemonics – Deborah Woodard

31. Easter Rabbit – Joseph Young

32. The Worse-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel – Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

33. Recipes for Endangered Species – Traci O’Connor

34. Blue for the Plough – Dara Weir

35. The Bodyfeel Lexicon – Jessica Bozek

36. The Myth of the Simple Machines – Laurel Snyder

37. Green Cammie – Crysta Casey

38. Mad to Live – Randall Brown

39. The Nightyard – Stephanie Anderson

40. The Energy of Slaves – Leonard Cohen

41. Pee on Water – Rachel B. Glaser

42. The Tiny Wife – Andrew Kaufman

43. Chelsea Girls – Eileen Myles

44. Hinge & Sign – Heather McHugh

45. A History of the Human Family – Sasha Steensen

46. Man’s Companions – Joanna Rucco

47. Sing, Mongrel – Claire Hero

48. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits – Kim Gek Lin Short

49. One More Theory About Happiness – Paul Guest

50. The Spell of the Sensuous – David Abram

51. Cut Away – Catherine Kirkwood

52. Chicken, Shadow, Moon & More – Mark Strand

53. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

54. The Field Guide to Flash Fiction – ed. Tara Masih

55. Alive and Dead in Indiana – Michael Martone

56. The Long-Legged Fly – James Sallis

57. The Father of the Predicaments – Heather McHugh

58. People are Tiny in Paintings of China – Cynthia Arrieu-King

59. Invitation to a Beheading – Vladimir Nabokov

60. The Art Lover – Carol Maso

61. The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence – Victor Marchetti & John D. Marks

62. Halfsteps + Cloudfang – Daniela Olszewska

63. Strange as This Weather Has Been – Ann Pancake

64. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives – David Eagleman

65. Soot- Jeff Walt

66. The Inquisition Yours – Jen Currin

67. The Tears of Eros – Georges Bataille

68. Advanced ELVIS Course – CAConrad

69. Theory of Religion – Georges Bataille

70. Vertical Hold – Jeff Simpson

71. The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981 – Amelia Rosselli

72. How the Broken Lead the Blind – Matt Bell

73. Reality Hunger: A Manifesto – David Shields

74. At the Point – Joseph Massey

75. Rust Or Go Missing – Lily Brown

76. Reasons to Live – Amy Hempel

77. Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master – Kevin Prufer & D.A. Powell, eds.

78. Goat Song – Brad Kessler

79. Deviant Propulsion – CAConrad

80. 2666 – Roberto Bolano

81. Saint Monica – Mary Biddinger

82. Refinery – Claudia Keelan

83. The Jiri Chronicles & Other Fictions – Debra Di Blasi

84. Dear Ra – Johannes Goransson

85. When You Are Engulfed in Flames – David Sedaris

86. The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch

87. Everlasting Quail – Sam Witt

88. Discipline – Dawn Lundy Martin

89. Speech Acts – Laura McCullough

90. Mascara – Ariel Dorfman

91. The Nights Also – Anna Swanson

92. No one belongs here more than you – Miranda July

93. Ask the Pilot: Everything You Need to Know About Air Travel – Patrick Smith

94. Glean – Joshua Kryah

95. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World – Haruki Murakami

96. Lord Brain – Bruce Beasley

97. Dien Cai Dau – Yusef Komunyakaa

98. The Good-Neighbor Policy - Charles Ardai

99. Coal Miner’s Daughter – Loretta Lynn (with George Vecsey)

100. Humiliation – Wayne Koestenbaum

101. This is What Happened in Our Other Life – Achy Obejas

102. Bossypants – Tina Fey

103. Reality Sandwiches – Allen Ginsberg

104. Daughter – Janice Lee

105. Notes from the Red Zone – Christine Pacosz

106. Citizen – Andrew Feld

107. Feel This Book – Janeane Garofalo and Ben Stiller

108. Birdland: The Story of a World Famous Bird Sanctuary – Len Hill and Emma Wood

109. The Descent – Sophie Cabot Black

110. April Galleon – John Ashbery

111. The Price of Light – Pimone Triplett

112. Betty Superman – Tiff Holland

113. Bone Pagoda – Susan Tichy

114. Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality – Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jetha

115. Music and Suicide– Jeff Clark

116. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction – Michel Foucault

117. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue – Samuel Delaney

118. Shoulder Season – Ange Mlinko

119. Epistemology of the Closet – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

120. The Queer Art of Failure – Judith Halberstam

121. The Cloud Corporation – Timothy Donnelly

122. The Madeleine Poems – Paul Legault

123. Predatory – Glenn Shaheen

124. Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the US State – Chandan Reddy

125. Crush – Richard Siken

126. Earth Day Suite – Joseph Harrington

127. The Rest of Love – Carl Phillips

128. The Displaced of Capital – Anne Winters

129. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination – Avery Gordon

130. Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex – Stanley A. Stanley & Nat Smith (eds.)

131. Cruel Optimism – Lauren Berlant

132. A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood – Allen Braden

133. The Evolution of the Flightless Bird - Richard Kenney

134. Tell me the Truth About Love – W.H. Auden

135. Mule – Shane McCrae

136. The Grief Performance – Emily Kendal Frey

137. A Little White Shadow – Mary Ruefle

138. Awe – Dorothea Lasky

139. Lake Antiquity – Brandon Downing