• Monday, April 8th: Indian Springs School, Birmingham, AL, 7pm. I’m part of the Indian Springs Visiting Writers Series which was highlighted recently in The Nation. Looking forward to seeing Douglas Ray and Jessica Smith, and discussing Skin Shift with their students! The public is welcome.
• Thursday, April 11th: Gay & Lesbian Poetry Night @ City College of NY, NY, 6:30pm. Room NAC 6/316.
• Saturday, April 13th: Rainbow Book Fair, 12noon-6pm, Holiday Inn Midtown, 440 W 57th St, NY. I won’t be reading, but I’ll be around the SRP table to sign copies of Skin Shift.
• Monday, May 20th: KGB Bar, NY, NY, 7pm. Reading with fellow UM poetry alum Rae Gouirand. Her collection Open Winter is amazing and has won all sorts of prizes and you should go buy and read it right now.

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I have a new poem, “Ditch-Digger” in the latest issue of Raintown Review. It’s from a new project, Book of M, which includes the Marilyn poems of recent years, a series set at the Museum of the Moving Image, and lots of Montreal poems. I just finished the first draft of the manuscript and am happily entering revision land.

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And a link for a chewy review of Skin Shift over at Lambda Literary by the fabulous Jerome Murphy.

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Happy National Poetry Month!

I tweaked the questions a bit as they had a prose writer bent to them, and seemed aimed at an unpublished manuscript (and though I have plenty of those, I figured I’d focus on the book that is published).

What is the title of your book?

Skin Shift

Who is the publisher of your book?

I’m proud to say Skin Shift lives at Sibling Rivalry Press under the careful eye of Bryan Borland.

What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry with a dash of essay, pinch of drama, and side of short-story in verse.

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

I think the book jacket copy says it best:

Skin Shift assembles a metamorphosis taxonomy in poems that spider spin, that nimbus twirl into Wonder Woman and leap with the Aboriginal kangaroo woman, that escape from a sub-trunk with Houdini and seduce like the Amazon’s pink river dolphin man. Traditional forms morph into experimental narratives, lyrics and dramatic monologues that present an invitation to slip inside the skins of others and to experience the mythologies that resonate in modern times.

Okay, that’s two sentences. Just ignore that little period pause in the middle.

What inspired you to write this book/where did the idea for the book come from?

It sprung from a deep love of mythology and a desire to track how certain myths still resonate in our times, and the pleasurable creative act of updating and recasting those myths in the modern world.  So the Narcissus story gets updated as a technology myth, Echo becomes a pop starlet of the Britney Spears variety, the construct of Uncle Remus taps into the trickster Anasi tradition to confront an ethnographer, the David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi love stories of the Bible are transported both culturally to a modern Hispanic immigrant family dynamic and located on a farm.  I’m a sucker for a good origin story.  Especially proto-queer origin stories, and part of the book’s aim is reclamation: queering myth out of a desire to make sure the long hidden or “exists only in subtext” histories of gays and lesbians are preserved and brought to light.  It’s by no means exhaustive, but I tried to have a good representation of stories from around the world, from the Bufeo Coloardo (pink river dolphins) of the Amazon to the Aboriginal how-the-kangaroo-came-to-be.

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

It took about 13 years or so to finish the final draft and write all the book’s parts, but the first draft of it probably dates to 2006 or 07, which puts the number of years at 9 or 10 for the first draft.  The oldest poem in the book dates from 1997; it’s gone through some heavy revision, but many of its core lines remain intact. The last poem was written mid-2009.

What are your influences for this book / what other books would you compare this book to within your genre?

Skin Shift has many sources, but is particularly indebted to Alice Fulton’s fractal poetics and Anne Carson’s mashing of essay, poem, drama, lyric all in the same space.  Both of them engage with myth-recasting, too, Fulton in Sensual Math with her updating of the Apollo & Daphne myth, and Carson in Autobiography of Red (and I’m super-excited for Red Doc>, the sequel coming out this year).

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Good question. There are many dramatic monologues in the book and the response I often get from theatre people is “I have to perform poem X on stage!” I’ve even been chatting with my good friend Troy about possibly adapting it for the stage, which would be fun. But I think I’ll make this a reader participation question. Dear readers, who would you like to see perform the following voices from the book (a partial list)?

• The Fresco Worker
• Mateus, the animal scientist
• Bufeo, the pink river dolphin turned man
• Uncle Remus
• Aunt Eloe
• The Ornithologist
• The Gypsy Woman
• The Spelunker
• The Alchemists
• The Taxidermist
• The Astronomer
• Two-Spirit
• Narcissus
• Echo
• Tiresias
• Rut
• David
• Juan
• and…the “I” closest to speaker-me?

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

It’s oversized (8×10, roughly the size of a graphic novel) and rocks awesome wrap-around cover art by the artist Michael DiMotta.

My tagged writers for next Wednesday (February 13th) are:

Douglas Ray, author of the poetry collection He Will Laugh (Lethe Press, 2012) and editor of The Queer South (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2014)

RJ Gibson, author of the chapbooks Scavenge (Seven Kitchens Press, 2010) and You Could Learn A Lot (Seven Kitchens Press, 2013)

The “From Motion to Stillness” exhibit is in collaboration with PoetsArtists Magazine which will publish an accompanying print and digital iPad issue. I’m on the cover of the iPad issue with a new photograph by the talented Maeghan Donohue:

Here’s a note about the exhibit:

From Motion to Stillness is an exhibition and a publication seeking to explore aspects of stillness, quietness, reflection, meditation, inner-peace, solitude, reflection and calmness as a human experience. Despite living in a fast-paced and rapidly changing world, From Motion to Stillness invites the viewer and the reader alike to pause for a moment and experience stillness as interpreted by some of today’s most exciting contemporary artists and poets.

From Motion to Stillness takes place in a gallery setting, print and digital formats. The exhibition is co-curated by Sergio Gomez of Chicago’s Zhou B Art Center (www.zbcenter.org) and Didi Menendez of PoetsArtists Magazine (www.poetsandartists.com).

The show runs from February 15 to March 10, 2013.

So here is my much-delayed list of favorite reads from 2012 (which I’m back-dating to January 1!). As always, I present these in alphabetical order, and must note this is just a sampling of my reading list from the previous year (a mish-mash of books recently published and books I’ve discovered years after they’ve been published):

• The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard by Joe Brainard
• American Terrorist by Tyler & Wendy Chin-Tanner
• Slow Lightning by Eduardo C. Corral
• Whirlwind by Sharon Dolin
• Une Semaine De Bonté: A Surrealistic Novel in Collage by Max Ernst
• Little Murders Everywhere by Rebecca Morgan Frank
• Catch & Release by D. Gilson
• Open Winter by Rae Gouirand
• The Nanopedia Quick-Reference Pocket Lexicon of Contemporary American Culture by Charles Jensen
• My Only Wife by Jac Jemc
• Unbuilt Projects by Paul Lisicky
• Special Powers & Abilities by Ray McDaniel
• He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices by Stephen Mills
• Western Practice by Stephen Motika
• Miracle Fruit, At the Drive-In Volcano, and Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
• The Martyrology and bpNichol Comics by B. P. Nichol
• Skin Job by Evan Peterson
• He Will Laugh by Douglas Ray
• Prop Rockery by Emily Rosko
• Palestine by Joe Sacco
• Just Kids by Patti Smith
• The Wanted by Michael Tyrell
• Sonics in Warholia by Megan Volpert
• Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward

I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few. And then there are the books I bought in 2012 that I still have not read for whatever reason. O never-dwindling stack of books by the bedside!

I started with a Christmas poem and then we turned to Skin Shift, picking up where we left off after my first appearance on his show.  We ended with some of my new Marilyn Monroe poems, many of which I hadn’t read to an audience yet, so it was nice to hear them breathe.

Here’s the set list of what I read:

• The Pickle and The Pear
• The Astronomer on Misnomers
• An Hour After the Meteor Shower
• Aunt Eloe Schools the Scarecrow
• Skin Game
• Not Berdache Not Gynandromorph Not Even Two Spirit
• At the Academy of Taxidermy Mirram Keeps a Secret
• Samson in Reverse
• Section V of The Metamorphosis Treatise
• In Pursuit of a More Perfect Armor
• I Am Not a Myth
• I’ve Got Nothin’ On But the Radio
• Monster Saw Mash Dust
• I’d Never Face A Live Audience Again–Except With a Loaded Machine Gun–
• No Garlic
• I Prefer Gentlemen in Bed
• M / Ghost M

• Zubair Ahmed
• Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
• John Chávez
• Feng Sun Chen
• Laura Cronk
• Natalie Diaz
• Gibson Fay-LeBlanc
• Matthew Hittinger
• Shara Lessley
• Adam Vines
• Marcus Wicker
• Angela Veronica Wong

Contributing editor Rigoberto González selected and introduces us (my profile/spread is on pages 72-73). The entire experience of Skin Shift coming into the world, from writing it to having Bryan select it as one of SRP’s titles, to working with him to put it together and with Michael DiMotta to do the cover, to its launch and reception–it has been one helluva magical experience. This is one post I don’t know how to properly exit, so I’ll leave you with a snapshot:

M/Ghost M

Tanka Answers to a Ten Question Interview

This brings my lifetime Pushcart nomination tally up to eleven. Always an honor when the editors of a magazine acknowledge your work.  And hey, maybe one of these years I’ll actually win one.  And to quote the first tanka from “Tanka Answers…” which answers the question “What are your thoughts on the Pushcart Prize and other anthologies?”

the pushcart woman

sells mango slices while you

wait for skewered cube

juice stick stuck stacked when jacked fruit

picks up a clear plastic cup

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A new poem–”No Garlic”–in the October 2012 issue of MiPOesias, an issue of poems and recipes dedicated to Grave Cavalieri. It’s one of my Marilyn Monroe poems, and takes her stuffing recipe to use as a frame.

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And two micro-reviews:

Steve Fellner looks at Skin Shift and Ruben Quesada’s Next Extinct Mammal at his blog Pansy Poetics.

And Stephen S. Mills takes a look at Skin Shift, Eduardo C. Corral’s Slow Lightning, and Amy Waldman’s The Submission at his blog Joe’s Jacket.

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Enjoy the final days of summer!

• A self-interview up at The Nervous Breakdown. My literary influences interrogate me.
• Poet and novelist Collin Kelley interviews me in his “Five Questions…” interview series at Modern Confessional.

On the anthology front, my poem “What Part of Don’t Ask, Don’t  Tell Don’t You Understand?” is in the new Love Rise Up: Poems of Social Justice, Protest and Hope edited by Steve Fellner and Phil E. Young.

And I forgot to post this back when it launched, but The Rumpus Original Poetry Anthology edited by Brian Spears came out a few months ago (and is best experienced on an iPad!).  My poem “Xanthic the Day, Cyanic the Day” is included.

Another anthology appearance coming before year end: some poems in People Are Starting To Talk About You edited by Shane Allison. Check out this interview with him over at Lambda Literary where he talks about the anthology and his latest book I Remember which pays homage to Joe Brainard.

Enjoy! Stay hydrated while you jirate!