Come to My Reading in New York, Perhaps?

So I am reading in Brooklyn to celebrate the release of my Why I Am White chapbook from Kitchen Press.

If you live in NY maybe you'd like to come to the event. Here's the info:

Kitchen Press & Cannibal Books
invite you to eat from the chopping block
w/

Erin Elizabeth Burke Run Down the Emphasis (Kitchen)
Thibault Raoult I'll Say I'm Only Visiting (Cannibal)
Mathias Svalina Why I Am White (Kitchen)

Friday, November 2nd, 8 PM
Unnameable Books
456 Bergen Street
btwn. 5th & Flatbush

Refreshments served, but you may also BYOB.
Kitchen Press and Cannibal Books products will be available for consumption.
Unnameable Books carries an excellent selection of poetry from independent presses.
This event is free for all.

I'll be flying out of Omaha at 5am, which means I have to leave for the airport at 3 am, which means I have to wake up even earlier, which means that if you see me in NY you should be very, very gentle with me so that I do not shatter into a pool of dried petals.


Above you can see a Chevette. A really beautiful, indestructible car.

Two Things You Can Know & A One-Act Play About Nebraska

Michael Dumanis & Sherwin Bitsui read at University of Nebraska Kearney tomorrow night. More info here.




My favorite online music magazine, Stylus, shuts its doors after today. That's too bad. They consistently had informed & not-too-pretentious-given-the-awful-state-of-indie-punk-avant-music-writing writing.





Real Life in Nebraska

Setting: Coffeeshop, 6:30AM

Characters: Old Man, heavy Midwestern accent
Old Woman, says "Oh Jeez" a lot

[OM rustles paper]
[OW sighs]

OM: There must be a lot of people who like cheese on their baked potato.
OW: Not me.
OM: No, not you. But there must be a lot of people who do.

[OW silent]

OM: Apple pie.
OW: oh jeez.

[more paper rustling]
[OW gets up, walks off stage as if to restroom]

OM: Organic salad?

The End

Draw a Face on This White Eggplant

It has such a wonderfully parted hairdo.

Anthony Hawley on Poetry Daily

Check it.

From the new issue of The Hat.

Man's Last Great Invention: Lost Boys Soundtrack

Two drummers: Nick & Anders
Two guitarists: Jim & Ande
Two singers: Me & Teal
Two Stars: Elisabeth & Felice


























Next Up, Halloween Night:
Hitchcock's The Birds
with live soundtrack by Man's Last Great Invention

Wed. Oct 31, 2007 7:00PM

The Benson Grind
6107 Maple St.
Omaha
If you require directions or GPS data, click here.

Sink Review & &

Here's a little update about collaborative poems.

I somehow missed that Julia Cohen & my poem went up in the latest issue of Sink Review, along with work from The Pines, CA Conrad & many other ninjas.

Also, issue 8 of Copper Nickel is out, which has a poem of ours in it & 10% of the proceeds will go to the New Orleans Public Library Rebuilding Fund.

A handful of our poems are also in the debut book from Counterfeit Press, entitled &: Double Exposures. Here's what Counterfeit has to say about it:

This book presents photographic and literary double exposures, with every page produced by teams of artists. The photographic contributions, coordinated by Denver artist Kedran Kraich, were produced when exposed film was mailed to photographers as far away as London for re-exposure to produce surprising overlays. The literary contributions, including work by Denver's own Noah Eli Gordon and Joshua Marie Wilkinson, were authored by teams of poets, each writing over and into the other's work.

What they don't tell you is that one of the teams is me & Julia. They were keeping in a secret so that your mother didn't find out. But now your mother knows. Every mother knows. Everything.

The Flintlock

Nebraska Wesleyan University's undergad lit mag

More Photos from This Weekend (Now with a Caption!)

In this shot Ken is looking at you.

Duct Tape Outside, Duck Blood Inside

Thank you Ken Rumble for being a part of The Clean Part Reading Series.



Thank you Julia Cohen for being a part of The Clean Part Reading Series.



Thank you Ana Bozicevic-Bowling for being a part of The Clean Part Reading Series.



If you ascribe to such things, you can see more photos on facebook.


Forthcoming from Billy Collins, I Can Smell Your Blood: New & Selected Poems

Sat Oct 27th, 7pm, Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery: Ana Bozicevic-Bowling, Julia Cohen & Ken Rumble

Three of my favorite poets & favorite peoples will be here Saturday to read at the Sheldon for The Clean Part Reading Series.

Now I know you might be all "I showed up for the last one & there was no poetry to be had." Well, that's true. However if you hold that against us then you are both a curmudgeon & a hater. A curmudgeonater. Now you may be many things, you may contain multitudes, but I know you do not want to be a curmudgeonater. Or if you do want to be one, you probably might not have a good time at the reading. But you should come anyways. It's going to be the best.




Look at these bios! Don't you love bios?

Ana Bozicevic-Bowling is a Croatian poet writing in English & the author of two chapbooks: Morning News (Kitchen Press, 2006) and Document (Octopus Books, forthcoming). Her recent poems are or will be in Octopus Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, In Posse, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel - Second Floor and Outside Voices 2008 Anthology of Younger Poets. She coedits RealPoetik and works at PEN American Center in New York City.



Julia Cohen's chapbook, If Fire, Arrival, is out with horse less press. Her other chapbooks, Who Could Forget the Sensational First Evening of the Night (Hangman Books), When We Broke the Microscope (written with Mathias Svalina, Small Fires Press), and The History of a Lake Never Drowns (Dancing Girl Press) are forthcoming this year. Here are some of her poems from The Adirondack Review and h_ngm_n. You can find more links to her poems on her blog. She lives in Brooklyn



Ken Rumble is the author of Key Bridge (Carolina Wren Press, 2007) which one reviewer describes as an "exuberant free-verse tour of Washington, D.C." He works as the marketing director for the Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina, with his daughter. His poems have appeared in the literary journals Octopus, Fascicle, Coconut, Cutbank, Parakeet, the tiny, Carolina Quarterly, and others. He is currently at work with his father on a nonfiction book about the Antarctic ozone hole.

Now look at this picture of baby turtles

Some Things I Would Like You

Christian Hawkey (aka, the Hawk without Wings (but with wings)), read last night. He is phenomenal. A poet whose imaginative leads carve experience up for me. If you ever want a treat ask him about his process for his new manuscript. When you ask him this he will bury you in a jar in the back yard of the woman or man who knows you the least.

I have received one email professing true love for him after his reading. I also received an email from a young woman from Africa with a compelling financial proposition.






There is an article about Zach & me in this week's issue of The Reader, Omaha's arts weekly.









The issue of Coconut is up, featuring great work by Lily Brown (Octopus author), Emily Frey, Paula Cisewski (Clean Part alum)& Norma Cole & a really cool piece by Carla Harryman.

From Lily's poem "Old With You"

I turn on the weather.

The weather
ashes the books.

The house can live
underwater. The house
can wear its rooms out.

New issues of Denver Quarterly & The Laurel Review are phenomenal. The new issue of New American Paintings has great work from Dorota Mytych, who may or may not live in Lincoln. Probably not. Maybe so?

Christian Hawkey, Wed Oct 24th, 7pm :: NWU Visiting Writers Series

NWU Visiting Writers Series presents

Poet Christian Hawkey

Wednesday, October 24th

Poetry Reading 7 pm
Callen Conference Center
Smith-Curtis Building

Q&A with Students 3:30
Alabaster Room
Old Main

Please join us Wednesday, Oct 24th when poet Christian Hawkey will give a reading as part of the NWU Visiting Writers Series. The reading will be at 7pm in the Callen Conference Center in the Smith-Curtis Building. He will also participate in an informal Q&A about poetry and poetics at 3:30 that day.



Christian Hawkey is the author of The Book of Funnels (Winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award), the chapbook HourHour, which includes drawings by the artist Ryan Mrowzowski (Delirium Press, 2005), and Citizen Of (Wave Books, 2007). His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, Volt, Denver Quarterly, Tin House, Crowd, Bomb, Chicago Review, Conduit, and other magazines. In 2006 he was given a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award, and this year he was awarded a 2008 DAAD Fellowship in Berlin. He teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York.





Critical Praise for Christian Hawkey:

The title of this collection [Citizen Of] serves as a challenge to readers in a political climate where alarmism seems to alternate with complacency. "Hour with One Hand Inserted in a Time of War" asks, "Should we / stand guard at the Level of One Hand Raised / to Block the Lemon Seed of the Sun / or should we push off, down the tunnels, / dig a hole in the side of a wall & wait?" Hawkey effectively conjures a contemporary scene that seems peaceful, even while "Landmines whisper sideways underground." Everyone, he says, is "no longer / a crow's nest but a cluster of nests, / urban, suburban, some with turbans." Humor, stemming more from exasperation than from delight, eases immersion into the tight-knit poems, but amid the laughter a loud alarm rings: "At least the bird?s brain was focused / on something."
--New Yorker

Simultaneously funny and eerie, Hawkey evokes feelings of giddy anticipation and anxious foreboding, as typified by "Green Solitude," which begins, "No such thing as exit for the man lost / In the middle of a cornfield. / No such thing as field," and which ends, "the sound / Of his listening was the landscape / Advancing at his approach." Like the best possible vacation or voyage, The Book of Funnels appeals to the reader as explorer, presenting the promise of surprise and discovery.
--Kathleen Rooney, Boston Review

For Hawkey, language is a strange tool, like a machine that begins to sweat and then turns beautiful. And if there is something unshakeable in this book, it is the poet's tremendously careful and necessary obliteration of how we expect language to work.


His poetry seems to whisper loudly into your face, to pluck at your ribs, to move you into a huge people-sized aquarium and, once you're acquainted with your fellow inhabitants, to fill with breathable green water through which you will see and feel everything from now on.
--Joshua Maria Wilkinson, Cranky Magazine




Poster by Anderson Reinkordt

Man's Last Great Invention Battles The Birds & The Lost Boys

Man's Last Great Invention, the band that I sing with, will be performing live soundtracks to two films the week after next. Both films are horrific. One of them was directed by the master of suspense & has little bird dolls flying through the air. One of them has heart-throb Jason Patrick eating maggots.







We did this once before as a soundtrack to The Predator. You can see/hear (touch i guess) a little selection of that show at hug-loving Elisabeth Reinkordt's vimeo site.