If You Like Me You Might Love Me Reading in Cleveland Thursday or Reading in Denver Saturday

This is happening tomorrow. If you live near Cleveland you can go. If you do not live near Cleveland you are not allowed to go. Sorry.


The Cleveland State University Poetry Center and the Department of English present:
A Reading and Book Signing with Poets Jason Koo, Simone Muench, and Mathias Svalina
Thursday, February 25th at 7:30 pm
Main Classroom 134, 1899 East 22 Street

Jason Koo is the author of the poetry collection Man on Extremely Small Island (C&R Press, 2009), winner of the 2008 De Novo Poetry Prize. His poems and prose have appeared in such journals as Bellingham Review, Gulf Coast, North American Review, Verse, and The Yale Review. He is the recipient of a 2009 fellowship in creative writing from the NEA. Koo, a native Clevelander, currently resides in New York City, where he teaches at NYU and Lehman College, and serves as Poetry Editor of Low Rent.

Simone Muench is the author of Orange Crush (Sarabande, 2010), Lampblack & Ash (Sarabande, 2005), and The Air Lost in Breathing (Helicon Nine, 2000). She is Director of the Writing Program at Lewis University, where she teaches creative writing and film studies. Currently, she serves on the advisory board for Switchback Books, and is an editor for Sharkforum. She lives in Chicago.

Mathias Svalina is the author of Destruction Myth (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2009), as well as four chapbooks and four chapbook-length collaborations. His work has appeared in such journals as Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, and jubilat. He is the co-editor of Octopus Magazine and the press Octopus Books.

Free and Open to the Public





Or you might love me in Justin Marks' thorax:





Then Saturday I'll be back in Denver, reading at the release party for a new locally-grown magazine The Umbrella Factory. They say this:

Umbrella Factory Magazine presents it's first reading
at Fluid Coffee Bar (19th & Pennsylvania, Denver)
February 27th, 7:30 - 9:30p.

We're excited to have Mathias Svalina, Julie Carr, and J. Michael Martinez reading, and we're pretty sure you'll regret not showing up. Bios below:

J. Michael Martinez’s writings have appeared in Five Fingers Review, New American Writing, Colorado Review, on NPR, and, most recently, in Quarterly West, Eleven Eleven, Copper Nickel, and Parthenon West . He is the recipient of the 2006 Five Fingers Review Poetry Prize; his collection Heredities was selected by Juan Felipe Herrera for the Academy of American Poets' Walt Whitman Award and will be published by Louisiana State University Press in 2010.

Julie Carr is the author of four books of poetry: Mead: An Epithalamion,
Equivocal, 100 Notes on Violence, which won the Sawtooth Poetry Award for
2009, and the forthcoming Sarah-of Fragments and Lines, a National Poetry
Series winner. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Nation, Boston
Review, and American Poetry Review. She is the co-publisher (with Tim Roberts)
of Counterpath Press and teaching at the University of Colorado at Boulder.


Mathias Svalina's first book, Destruction Myth, is out from Cleveland State University Press. He is the author of five chapbooks, and the co-author of another five. His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, The Boston Review, Diagram, Jubilat, and many other journals. With Zachary Schomburg, he co-edits Octopus Magazine and Octopus Books. He teaches and lives in Denver.

Any questions? E-mail me at oren@umbrellafactorymagazine.com

February Mega Mix

I'm sick & fevery. My brain is not working properly.

Therefore, after buying pants online, I decided to make a February Mega Mix. Thirty-Six songs.

Download it here: http://www.megaupload.com/?d=M9GLQEBR.

Here's the tracklisting:

1. Oda a los calcetines -- read by Anders Peterson
2. Mwana Talitambula -- v/a Abayudaya
3. Wild Nights - Wild Nights! -- Josephine Foster
4. Careless Love -- Lulu Jackson
5. Prettywings -- Maxwell
6. Goth Star -- Pictureplane
7. Gnangran -- Issa Bagayogo
8. Onda Miercolera -- Frikstailers
9. Coconuts -- CocoRosie
10. Musik Für Alle -- Black To Comm
11. Xerox Docucolor 12 -- Xerophonics
12. A Night in the House of Prayer -- Rev Lonnie Farris
13. Just To Get Away -- Poison Idea
14. Skogssvinet -- Ildjarn
15. Falling World -- Swallow The Sun
16. Pour maintenir encore une fois la distance -- Celeste
17. All Out Pain Lust And War -- Burmese
18. LIITAL -- Aby Ngana Diop
19. Stand To My Guns -- Dead Ups
20. Eternal Day -- Georgia Sacred Harp Convention
21. That's That -- DOOM
22. 50 Mile View -- Mount Kimbie
23. Ghabileh-Ye Lily -- Mehr Pooya
24. New Burying Ground -- The John Edwards Singers
25. Adelebo Ilu Eko -- Godwin Scotland
26. The Silk Merchant's Daughter -- Dellie Norton
27. Iso Lääkelaiva -- Avarus
28. Church Bells -- Kid Prince Moore
29. Make You Mine -- Best Coast
30. Deror Yikra -- Adib David
31. Danza Danza -- Fantasma
32. Bun Up 3000 -- South Rakkas Crew feat Capleton
33. Top Notch (Feat Mouse & Lil Phat) -- Lil' Boosie
34. Lights, Camera, Action -- Remy Ma
35. Lam Sarawan -- Ubon Pattana with Surin Paksiri
36. Watcher of the Night -- Torch

Denver Poetry Alert: This Saturday: Gordon, Kapil & Buuck Reading at the Dikeou Collection, 7pm

Noah Eli GORDON
Bhanu KAPIL
David BUUCK

will read at the Dikeou Collection, Downtown Denver

with musical guest
Edward ALMOST

in the first reading of the relaunched Dikeou Collection Reading Series

7pm on Saturday, February 20th 2010

There will be beers, treats and access to the Dikeou Collection of artwork.

The Dikeou Collection
The Colorado Building, 1615 California Street (at 16th Street), Suite 515
Take the elevator to the 5th floor ...

Things I Learned on Valentine's Day

Things I Searched on Wiki in the Last 24 Hours

The RZ
Amana Colonies
Home, Washington
Movement 2 June
Rote Zora
Lois Waisbrooker
Deir Yassin Massacre
List of Massacres

So you know where my head is.

Go Buy These: Julie Carr's 100 Notes on Violence & Andrew Zawacki's Petals of Zero Petals of One

Two books here that really knocked me out. The first is Julie Carr’s 100 Notes on Violence. As you can guess from the title, this is an extended meditation on violence, but not a kind of reading-the-newspaper-&-writing-about-it process but an ongoing consideration of the instatiation of violence: violence as Deluzian immanence, violence as cultural commodity, violence as the gravitational core of so much of what we read, violence as daily experience. This is the kind of book that reads as interesting on the poen-by-poem level, but as absolutely breathtaking as an entire work. Carr avoids flash & spectacle in individual poems in order to allow for greater intellectual & emotional resonance over the course of the whole book. That being said, though, you can read a representative piece from the Ahsahta website here. Also, I wanted to include this piece, which as a recent Denver transport I have come to identify with:

61. Colorado

Colorado has the highest rate of teen depression in the nation. believe it. In a class of thirteen 19-20 year olds, two are bipolar, two are alcoholic, one can’t wake up, one’s boyfriend has just been shot. Sores around the mouth. Skin burned red. One misses class, bailing her friend out of jail. Another’s being stalked and must get a court order. Kid you not. Most are on meds. Sunny skies. Lots of skiing. Who can account? Little, Colorado, whereof the Columbine Massacre, is an unimpressive suburb. But pretty. Mountains in the distance. Lots of skiing. Lots of churches. Sad, sad mothers and fathers.

I’m done. Done doing this and doing that and saying this and saying that I’m done. Done for and done in, done doing for and being done to. Under delicate bits of dust, I swim backwards. Now that’s a trick. If you must make a racket, do it somewhere else, someone said. Someone said, Everything I do is a text. I filter my life through the text of my face. That’s big, someone answered, that’s really big. Wanna share a foot-long? No, I can’t do that. Someone said, This should be put on hold, but later, somewhere, we’ll come upon its true sense. Someone said, I cannot enter normal places, but instead stand outside, tapping on store windows. It has something to do with the heat. Something to do with the wayward. She ran down the street in her heels, sobbing as he persued her. As soon as I’m done here, I’m going to fall asleep. Do I have no stamina? None whatsoever. Did you own a gun? Never did. And why didn’t you? It was redundant, he says. Quiet, quiet, still. Said want that well done or rare? But what could be more rare than you?

Than you, sad mother, sad father?

I read Andrew Zawacki’s recent book, Petals of Zero Petals of One, while on a over-long bus & light-rail ride through the slush-slopped streets. It’s the kind of book that made me wish I was sitting next to someone who gave a shit about poetry so that I could read it out loud to her or him. I’ve always been interested in, & challenged by Zawacki’s work, though never fully blown away by it. This one blew me away.

The book consists of three long poems, the first one is, in my opinion, a kind of redefining poem for Zawacki as a poet. You might have read it in the last issue of 1913; I hadn’t. It’s a blistering 26-page piece that revolves around the idea of & more importantly the word Georgia. Its mantra repetition of the word in almost every line is entrancing, but also bewildering. The word is used in syntactically appropriate ways just as often as it is there as a musical punctuation mark. The poem expresses anger & affection for the state, but just as much for the word. Georgia (where Zawacki lives) becomes, through the power of the poem, both the public referent with a history & a politics & the internalized recognition that this is one of the nodes of a life. It becomes part of everything.

This is again a poem that only does what it does by reading the entire thing in a rush. And you will rush – the prosodic spirit of the poem is far more Ginsberg & Corso that I ever would have expected out of Zawacki, whom I’d seen as more hermetic in the past. This poem will completely in habit you.

Go Buy This: Justin Taylor's Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever

I'm very excited about this book.

I think you should buy it.

The New York Times Book Review agrees with me here



Look at information about it here.



Look at a weird picture here

Pictures of Me: 1975-1997

So I didn't used to take a lot of pictures.


I didn't like to be photographed & I was wary of cameras in general.


I went through brief phases, though, of taking some photos.


Now I've scanned in a bunch of photos of my youth


& i want to share them with you.
















You can order brass knuckles here.