Local Launch, Saturday, September 11

ELIZABETH J. COLEN, MONEY FOR SUNSETS (POETRY)

Start: Sat, 09/11/2010 - 7:00pm
Location:
Village Books
1200 Eleventh Street
Bellingham, Washington 98225


Set partly in Bellingham, partly on the open road, these prose poems investigate loss, innocence, and what it means to live in beautiful surroundings that remain part of a larger deficit culture. With a narrative arc that follows a hyper-observant narrator from adolescence through adulthood, this book has been described (by poet Mary Biddinger) as “Cinematic and compassionate, sexy and heartbreaking… a debut collection that will thrill you with the sound of your own pulse.”


Event page here: hope to see you there!

Frances and I sat in the park.

Sometimes, especially when reading, I look up and am shocked to find myself where I am. So transported by the world I have entered through language that the "real" (what I'll contend is not-as-real) world has dropped away. It is also like napping in an unfamiliar place, dream state to new sometimes equals a moment of surprise. Who needs vacations? Okay, I do. And will be taking one soon.

In my studio I nap on the hard indoor/outdoor carpeting, my head on some rolled up piece of fabric I've snatched from studiomate Lisa's vast shelves. In those few moments upon waking I'm not sure if I'm paralyzed, in grass, underwater or what.

Yesterday I was in the co-op (in Mount Vernon!) and I wasn't sleeping. I was reading (re-reading) Stacey Levin's Frances Johnson. I figured it was re-released, I could read it again. New to me! Not so, but it's been awhile. It's a good book, strange. What I'll call the Seinfeld school of novelling. A novel in which nothing really happens. This is also what my most recently completed (and recently begun circulating) novel is like. Something happens towards the end, but it's not big. What happens big is internal. This, I think is more how our lives really are. No one I know has ever been shot. (Wait, I don't think. Though I did see someone get stabbed when I was a kid. He survived! It was OK!) And wild romance isn't really that interesting. I couldn't write a murder mystery (the ultimate SOMETHING happening) or a thriller or, well, no, maybe I could, but it would be an alien thing. The book and the experience. Maybe I'll write a mystery. Really most of the world (and the internal workings of everyone, myself included) is a mystery. So any novel--

Anyway, Frances Johnson. Like this (this is where I was going), this is how I feel: "Immediately, she fell into a hapless, jagged doze, only to wake moments later, frightened back from the horizon of unconsciousness, for she had seen a turtle there" (12). This is what it's like to read in public.



It doesn't always take so long to get to a point. Sometimes it takes longer.

It's kind of how I feel in opposite though. It's not the turtles I'm afraid of. Maybe falling brick. I've been dreaming about earthquakes again. (This morning I walked past a house in my neighborhood with a sign out front advertising that it had been retrofitted for earthquake proofing and had a number to call. In my usual overzealous panic I thought, should we do this? we should do this. But our house has been standing for a hundred years. I trust it. As much as one should trust a house.)

Like the day C's father died and I had just woken from a dream in which an earthquake occurred in a hospital room and the nurse and everyone in the room was freaking out and he was in the bed and said, why is everyone so upset; everything's okay. We're all fine. And then we got the call he had died. In dreams lately it's no one I know; sometimes it is, but rarely. Last week before seeing Deb Poe I had a dream about Deb Poe and Karl was showing me around their house at what they had done.

So the book's out. Luckily I read everything, Kate Greenstreet's blog interviewing poets about first books, some other personal accounts, and talked to people I know, C and others. All of this was kind of like reading What to Expect When You're Expecting. I didn't expect my life to change and it hasn't. Except this month I'm letting myself off the hook a little about submitting things and writing new things (which means I am writing new things, but relaxedly). The time off's been nice. And next month the train. I was going to give myself time off then as well (at least I can't really do submissions), but I'll make that decision come the first of the month or so.

I'm working the earthquake dreams into the new stuff I'm doing, trying not to make it at all about dreams though, but real things that happen. Backdrop of a city, buildings coming down. Not coming down, because the earthquake is mild. But enough shaking that people start thinking more concretely about a "big one."

(Read about tsunamis from a thick blue book. Read about the Big Ones, the ones that killed, the causes, how many dead. Read about velocity and volume, then go down to the water.Walk the beach, feet tipped in low waves. Imagine every tremor an earthquake—waves, birds beating quiet wings, a waterfall—then shiver as you watch the horizon for the swell.)

The above is actually from a poem in Money for Sunsets, but every time I say or think "big one" that's what runs through my head.

So I'm relaxed, sort of.

I'm also sending the book places, which takes some time. Who knew 5-line cover notes could take so long?

How else the book has or has not changed my life: holding it. I understand it's possible. That the others can find homes. That maybe I'm a Writer. Also that no one can take this away from me. Maybe I am still that younger version of myself with the threat of heartbreak in its varied and maniacal manifestations hanging over me. Any floor can drop. But this one I can walk on. I feel like a teenager who has just given birth so that someone will always love her. How's that for mixing metaphors? MFS, be a good little child.

Money for Sunsets

"David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein." -Denise Duhamel, author of Ka-Ching!

“Protean like dreams, jittery montages of the quotidian-turned-nightmare, Elizabeth J. Colen’s lyrical prose poems in Money for Sunsets shed a steady gaze on our present moment.” –Khaled Mattawa, author of Tocqueville

"Here are poems that speak many minds with a single voice." -Shane McCrae, author of Mule

“Cinematic and compassionate, sexy and heartbreaking, this is a debut collection that will thrill you with the sound of your own pulse.” –Mary Biddinger, author of Prairie Fever

Get your copy here: http://www.amazon.com/Money-Sunsets-Elizabeth-J-Colen/dp/0982416938/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1276661418&sr=1-1

I came home last night to a box of books on my porch. Slept with one in the room last night. Carried one around all day. Yeah, she's pretty. Prettier than me. Probably a little smarter and dirtier, too.

Excitement.

Hooray! It looks like all is well in the world of the book. That is, in Money for Sunset's world. The world within the book is still a little bit messy -- what with our world being messy as it is, but the proofs are proofed and gorgeous, thanks to Tom C. Hunley and his crew.

I've had more people ask me what the book is "about," not satisfied with the answer, "well, it's poetry, prose poetry." (Yes, I say this kind of like Bond, James Bond.) So I'm working out a description my aunts or my grandpa could spout when someone asks. Something along the lines of...

"An individual examination of our culture of deficit. You know, with sex and stuff thrown in."

Okay, so it's a working description. But that first part I like. And there is a lot of sex in the book. Appropriate sex, sex in inappropriate places, beach sex, imagined sex. I could go on.

In reading the book again while proofing I realized,

a) Hey, this is a really good book! (I hadn't read it in probably more than a year, so distanced it seems sometimes like some other creature wrote it. But they are my obsessions in there.)

b) There is a lot of talk about overconsumption, and specifically about oil. Oddly. I finished this book more than two years ago, but somehow all the environmental stuff that crops up seems way more relevant today than it did even then.

Must. Walk. Dog.

Thanks for checking in.

Official News Update from Steel Toe Books:

We are pleased to announce the winners of our 2009 poetry book prizes.

Guest Judge Denise Duhamel, the 2009 Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Western Kentucky University, selected MONEY FOR SUNSETS by Elizabeth J. Colen as winner of the Judge’s Prize. In her judge’s citation, which will serve as a foreword for the book, Duhamel had the following to say about Colen’s haunting sequence of prose poems: “If I were Colen’s agent, I’d pitch these poems to a movie producer as “David Lynch meets Gertrude Stein.” MONEY FOR SUNSETS, like TENDER BUTTONS, is syntactically rich and varied, using fragments, repetition, and word association. If I were Colen’s agent, I might not mention her complicated and smart observations on women, violence, and money – since I’m assuming that most movie producers are capitalists. . . . Innovative and evocative, these poems have arrived at just the right cultural moment. And I, for one, am grateful they’re here.”

Tom C. Hunley, Director of Steel Toe Books, has selected ZEPHYR by Susan Browne as winner of the Editor’s Prize. Browne’s poems have both heart and smarts, both gravitas and a sense of humor. Here is a short poem from Zephyr which we read as an ars poetica as well as an example of Browne’s keen, compassionate eye:

A Robin with Ragged Wings

perches on the edge of the roof, chirping feebly
to the sky, his head turned at an odd angle
as if his neck is broken, and some of his feathers
look like the cat tried to saw them off
with her claws. He’s about to die any second,
but he doesn’t stop his song,
reminding me of the many on earth who ask
and never receive. I stand by the window,
wondering how can I help, searching the apple
tree for his buddies to come save him.
I go outside for a closer look. He’s gone.
The yard is weirdly quiet without
that wretched singing.

MONEY FOR SUNSETS and ZEPHYR edged out these finalists:

SMILES OF THE UNSTOPPABLE by Jason Bredle
DEATH OBSCURA by Rick Bursky
MY BODY, TORN FROM ME by Anna Evans
AMERICAN BUSBOY by Matthew Guenette
DEAD MAN’S WORD by Greg McBride
DISAPPEARING ADDRESS by Simone Muench and Philip Jenks
CANNOLI GANGSTER by Joey Nicoletti
NOTHING FATAL by Sarah Perrier
WHAT REMAINS, PERSISTS by Doris Umbers
THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF A DISAPPOINTING APOCALYPSE by Gabriel Welsch

On queue

I learned yesterday that my first book of poems, entitled Money for Sunsets was chosen by Denise Duhamel for Steel Toe Books' 2009 Judge's Prize and will be unleashed in 2010.

The year 2010 looks space-aged for some reason. It's only next year.

More later!

For now, should you need a brief morning read, I have a new little story up at Juked. Click........ here.