Books and Birthday

The Complete Birthday News

I have gone around the sun another time. My eldest is in North Carolina (where I ought to be, instead of being a frozen magnolia in the No’th), and my husband the mighty adventurer is stalking around after elk and mule deer in the wilds of Montana (his share of Akwesasne Mohawk blood must be acting up), so the day will be comparatively quiet around here with me, R, and N. Cake, presents, and modest frolics in the offing.

Book-length fiction: Val/Orson

Val/Orson (U.K.: P. S. Publishing) now has a pub date of March 2009. If anyone would like a pre-pub .pdf copy to review for print or web publications, including blogs, please leave me a note. And if anyone would like to pre-order, the book will be available in jacketed hardcover (limited edition of 200) and hardcover (limited edition of 500). (Does that seem confusing? What it means is that the hardcover without a jacket will have the jacket image on the body of the book.) Catherynne M. Valente will write the introduction.

Long narrative poems and lyrics

Currently I have poems forthcoming in Books & Culture and Mezzo Cammin. As I like Mezzo Cammin, I have sent the editor a number of poems and will have some in the December 2008 and June 2009 issues. I’ll put up a link when “The Throne of Psyche” goes up there, as I’d love to have any feedback on that one. It’s blank verse narrative in seven parts. In addition, chapter IV of my 24-part post-apocalyptic poem, Thaliad, will be up soon at qarrtsiluni. Any feedback on the long poems will be appreciated…

Stories

I also have several stories coming out in Postscripts, the hardcover/softcover magazine of P. S. Publishing—just signed limited edition sheets for the December issue. They will be shifting to anthology format soon. “Rain Flower Pebbles” is the one due out next month; it is another in a small series of stories that pilfer reality—my children, my federal house, the Fenimore-and-baseball-famous Village of Cooperstown—for purposes of strangeness.

Currently out is “Static” in Extraordinary Engines (a steampunk anthology from Solaris, edited by Nick Gevers), a rather Dickensian revel involving static, spontaneous combustion, and lightning. Next up (January 6, 2009) is “The Chinese Room” (DAW, ed. Pete Crowther) in We Think, Therefore We Are. This is a zany story based on an artifical intelligence “thought experiment” of John Searle. If that is not enough for you, there are midgets and former jockeys and love and sausages.

And there will be more anthology stories in 2009 as I whirl around the sun.

Photo credit: I have borrowed (as Huck Finn would say) this from Eric H., on www.visitingcooperstown.com/library.html, so be sure and visit his site--you can see what I see on a regular basis! I eyeball the interior of the library a lot more often than the precincts of The Baseball Hall of Fame, I promise.

Please check out poems by Corey Mesler directly below--I'm banging shut the door until the Another Dratted Birthday banner flies on the 22nd. I need to meet deadlines, literary and otherwise, and when I come back, I'll have news. I'll do my annual purge of ephemeral posts as well. For now, feel free to leave Corey a note or questions... Addendum, Nov. 5: We have a President-elect who has shown people that a man of any color can become President of a country that promised to be a nation under God, with liberty and justice for all, and that is good. Here's advice for each of us, including presidents, from Honest Abe Lincoln: Whatever you are, be a good one.

Long Grass Books no. 5, Corey Mesler

Some Identity Problems


Corey Mesler is a penpal of mine—met in the e-aether some time after he reviewed a book of mine for the Memphis Commercial Appeal—and so I want to pay some notice to the fact that he has published that most-ignored thing, a book of poems. FootHills Publishing has stitched up Some Identity Problems as an attractive book, generous in its profusion of poems.

You will never meet this amusing, charming poet and novelist on tour because he is agoraphobic and stays home in Memphis, but you can meet the joy, whimsy, love, anxiety, and contradiction in his poems. Many of these poems are modest in scale but have reach. As a whole they are kaleidoscopic—swerving from low to high in diction, playful, belated in feeling or elated, revealing a persona that struggles to find a center, meaning, worldview. He frolics in the realm of the absurd, then evinces a heart of ripped-open sincerity. He bumps from sacred to profane, leaping from monkey to man to deity. His favorite tropes involve repetition and variations on it, startling metaphor, and the yoking of opposites—a Barcalounger linked to mythic depths.

If you wish to buy a copy, the ideal place to buy is from the bookstore that Corey and his wife Cheryl run in Memphis—Burke’s Book Store, the oldest bookstore in Memphis, founded in 1875. That’s what I’m doing because I can support the book of poetry and bookstore at once. Mine is beautifully signed, so be sure and ask for an inscription!

Addendum:
If you'd like to ask Corey a question here, feel free!
I'll roust him for an answer.

CHTHONIC LIBRARY

The red book we keep high on a shelf
where children can’t reach.
The blue book is for those who won’t
read anything else. The black
book is where I write everything down,
the names of the children,
the reasons we keep the books, and the
way out, if that becomes necessary.

AN ORRERY FOR CHLOE

I will paint the paper sky
with pinpoints of light,
put a smile on the
waif-like moon.
I will walk with you onto
the sunbeams
that color our porch like
a prism exploding.
And, in the end, if the
wayward universe
will not bend to our every
wish, I will filibuster
god to give you all the
comforts of home,
on this rickety planet, even
as she speeds through
space on a collision course
with eternal profusion.

WHAT MOVES IS PAST

“A lonely moon is mirrored in the cold pool.
Down in the pool there is not really a moon…”
Hanshan

By remote water I have sat
thinking of this and that
and speaking names into
the water, as if there I would
receive back echo. Those
who no longer are near,
those who no longer care,
all those who took me into
themselves and then moved on,
I talk to the river about them.
The river itself is never still,
but it answers something in me
which is deep and almost beyond
recollection. It answers that those
names are now made of silence.

Yet another addition, October 30th: I took a peek at Corey's publisher, and feel that I have been remiss in neglecting to mention how interesting and industrious they appear. Poet and publisher Michael Czarnecki writes of the small company that "FootHills Publishing was formed in 1986 for the purpose of getting into print the words of poets who found it hard to get their work out to the public other than at readings or in the occasional magazine. The first few books were published in conjunction with Great Elm Press, operated by Walt Franklin. Since then, FootHills Publishing has released more than 250 chapbooks or books." The company has all the virtues and determination of a cottage industry: "I do the editorial work - Carolyn handles the book production and shipping and our two boys, Grayson (16) and Chapin (12), help with production. Grayson also assists with some design work. All of our books are now hand-stitched and we have received many compliments on the quality of the work, both in content and production." The picture of Corey's book below doesn't show the stitching, but it's quite evident and attractive when one sees a copy, as is the good quality of the materials. I looked them up and see that they are just barely west of the finger lakes, and probably got as much snow as we did yesterday...

Fiction & Politics, with a dash of poetry

What I have learned from and since writing a post about the current election:

1. People may hate politics but they can't seem to stop talking about it; this is not like the case with poetry, for example. What would the world be like if people talked about poetry as much as they talk about politics? What would the world be like if we had a poetry these days that was deserving that kind of talk and interest? When will we again have a poetry that is again deserving of our fervor? When will we have a poet who is able to tie the shoes of W. B. Yeats or Blake or Shakespeare? Now there's a Messiah complex! Yes, I am fleeing the topic.

2. The reason I fly the topic is that I continue to have a great distaste for politics, which I regard as an inevitably-corrupting enterprise with little “place for the genuine,” beginning as it so often does with lawyers (caveat: I do know several honorable ones) and going on from there. I would never write a novel about politicians because the pen would fall from my fingers in boredom, despite the importance of their shenanigans. Just talking about the whole subject bothers me . . .

Now I am re-considering that boredom and contemplating how the current runners might appear in fiction and find that I have underrated them all--there is no one who, dwelt on with sufficient curiosity, will not begin to show possibilities as a fictional person. Palin, who has enormous vim (a highly desirable trait in a paper person) and is peppered with contradictions, might bag a major role, while Biden would make an excellent malaprop-style minor figure in a comic tale--his acts leavened with and undercut by humor. Obama: I’d go straight to the instant when his wife finally found something to be proud of in America, and I’d explore that two-edged Messiah impulse. McCain: I’d bee-line to those dogged, determined, sweaty years of survival in Vietnam.

3. Alas, I still have huge reservations about the current election plots and various unreliable narrators among the media. That means I am still unsure about the story circling around my own party's candidate. He is certainly attractive in his manner and appearance, and I hope his inner self proves worthy of the outer one.

4. "Have something that matters to you more" (credit: Annie) is wise, and I suppose is the way I have generally behaved—often averting my eyes from debacle. No doubt I will go on doing so.

5. I still don't imagine that what I think matters a whit, but I write it down to thank those of you who left a note to suggest that it might, even though it doesn't! On the other hand, those who left a few words probably couldn't help it because of the pressing logic of “People may hate politics but can’t help talking about it.”

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Credit: Thanks to photographer Lauren Burbank and sxc.hu for the patriotic barn.