"Dried up the death" etc-- excerpts from Eckes, Lundwall, Iredell

One of the great things about doing readings is the people you meet. And another great thing (sometimes) is the new work that you're exposed to through these people. The books they recommend. Sometimes their own work. To follow are excerpts from 3 writers I met at readings in Philadelphia, Atlanta and St. Louis.


1) Ryan Eckes.
Ryan curates (I love the word "curate") the Chapter and Verse Reading Series in Philadelphia. Here are some excerpts from his unpublished manuscript of prose and line-broken poems:

"i raise my arms in glory and lockheed martin, the world's largest weapons manufacturer, donates a computer to one of philadelphia's under-resourced schools. it's like doing the wave. i've been doing it for years."

"the customer is white, the clouds are white, my cap is white, my shoes are black, the tires of the car are black, abbas is black, he's from guinea--i ask him about it, he says its very very far away. way up high across the street a woman waves down from a window as if her building's on fire"

"it's better perhaps to hold
your breath, let the shadow stretch

out, cold and dry, moon
sucking at earth,

oceans rolling over
and over in its ditches."

and

"....the sky
was a dime and it

blew into me and dried
up the death and i

fell into sleep fifty feet
deep and woke up as air

with you..."


2) Andrew Lundwall
I read with Andrew in St. Louis last summer. Andrew, among other things, publishes e-chapbooks through his Scantily Clad Press

Here are some excerpts from his manuscript "forget the swan"

"finders. keepers. losers. weepers. fist in mouth again. the shopping bag's in the mirror sad. it rains. paralytic song on the radio. i'm a warrior. where's the pyramid thing? the blowdryer? the signal? umbrella overhead everyone's playing cards in america."

"trembling egg sockets. pull cigarettes from pack from pocket the wind instead. the wind instead of it's outside. she's parked her car in the look in her eyes. she's already there back to heineken bottle big green glass shards."

"carcinogen is a. morbid-flavoured. almost flowered overwhelming. volley."

"losers flowered to the america. anything forecaster says is beautiful secret. big rains overwhelming. poem is beautiful like a blowdryer. like so many here. sing each look like a keeper. or a weeper the cigarette radio says. maybe that's all?"


3)James (Jamie) Iredell
I first met Jamie when I read in Atlanta last fall. Here are some excerpts from his chapbook "Atlanta" which was published in 2008 from DOGZPLOT

"I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks. The cat wailed to go outside, forever and ever."

"Nights we sucked swill at the Highlander. One night we ended up with a gram of coke. We got too high to talk, which was good, since the next day the bus started, and they left."

"When he called, I was thrusting on top of a girl from the Highlander, a woman with more piercings than skin. It was like fucking the inside of a gumball machine."

"and the sunlight speared in whenever someone opened the door, like God peeking in and not liking what He found: Kevin's giant beak agape, and rows of stark white teeth."