Dangerous House of Pages

a nice little blurb-review of Holy Land at James Schiller's Under Speech

"brute strength"

"demented"

"textual knuckles"

etc

click here to read

Holy Land: Bi-Polar and Paranoid Schizophrenic (??)

one of the more interesting comments about my book Holy Land:

"My best woman friend was a severe case of what used to be called manic depression. And my son was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic as a teenager. For some reason, those relationships have made me better able to understand some of your stuff."

A Needle Hits

A needle hits and a whale gets roped—eyes bulging, jerked back to dirt. Sharks go at my body, but lightning holds me together, and a girl with long grey fingers rubs my chest as she stares out to sea. The sky’s trying to speak. Rocks and trees all bent in heat.

from my book, "Holy Land"

She's on top of me

She’s on top of me, thrusting down, and I’m in her eyes—as bright and dead as a glass-sculpted wall of flowers—bent back and blood, like the tail of a horse, splashed all over my chest. Her face is smashed.

from my book "Holy Land"

Colored Birds Chirping

Lying next to each other after we made love, she told me about the operation and how the blood flowed weakly through her body. Her eyes lit up as though she was remembering a boy who’d died at war, and I saw you, my brother, in bed surrounded by colored birds chirping.

from my book Holy Land

Van Gogh - Holy Land

I can feel the cells in me strengthening: a horse rising up in a field of broken wheat Van Gogh is painting the day he killed himself.

from my book Holy Land

Turtles & Love Birds

I’ve got six turtles. I’ve also got six Love Birds, 2 green, 2 blue and 2 multicolored. A hawk swoops down and attacks them. They’re all ok, but understandably, damned shook up. Last night I dreamed two were dead. I took their heads and necks into my mouth and breathed gently.

(from my book "Holy Land")

p.s. those Love Birds pictured are hotel keys from when I stayed in Chicago in the spring.

Talking to God

Talking to God’s like jerking off. You strain in the dark for years, but then a fuse gets lit, and people come screaming out of the fire. They land in the streets, their arms and legs blown off. A man on a horse tips his hat. Marilyn holds down her dress. In the charred air, angels hang.




(poem from my book, Holy Land)

There's a Child in a Ditch

There’s a child in a ditch by the side of the road. She’s the source of every drop of blood. Shadows, knives, machetes——angels sharpening the horns of beasts you’ll never see. Over the long, dazzling fields they come: one small piece of time, chained to the next, howling and deep. They stomp and they spit. You belong to them.

The first poem of section I of my book Holy Land

(That feels like a million years ago)

(this poem was first published in Poemeleon)

Kissing Turtles - Capturing and Manufacturing Energy - First Book Questions

Keith Montesano just interviewed me re Holy Land for his First Book Interviews series which is starting back up after a hiatus.

among other things I talk about

---Turtles
---My father's Bar Mitzvah Bible
---Star Trek
---Violence and Tenderness (yawn)
---The Shape of a Storm
---Kittens
---Ego-Management (rejection sucks)
---"Amping" things up
---dream dream dream dream dream dream dream

etc
etc

and, o, yeah, I talk about my first book, Holy Land


check it out here

South Bend to Chicago-- A sun-like poem

Here are the highlights of my train ride from South Bend to Chicago this afternoon:

1--

2--

3--

4--

5-- I scribbled down the first draft of a poem that for now I believe is going to be the center poem radiating through my 2nd collection. (a sunlike poem lighting both ways out of the center, through the entire book, while, at the same time, like a black hole, the universe's end-cunt, sucking everthing into its greedy dark and nothing center.) This is good news, if it pans out. (and not so bad if it doesn't). Several times since Holy Land I've sat down and tried to get a 2nd full-length manuscript into play. And each time it's miscarried. Not enough water and light. No real passion, juice, semen, blood, whatever. But, today, on this God-forsaken train ride (I could type the word Bleak about 7 thousand times here and that wouldn't come close) I was making my own God (more like Goddess really) and I was believing. I'm a bit sceptical now. But, it's good to believe. And so I keep spinning that sun inside me. And I am spinning too. Drawing in light all of it. Hoarding it. And erupting it all, finally. Horribly. And maybe. Maybe.

6--

7--

8--

9--

New Review of Holy Land

Coinciding nicely and exactly with the release of my Kitchen Press Chapbook "Ringing," a new, and brief, review of Holy Land has just appeared on Goodreads:

"Someone let me borrow this terrible book. I wish I could wipe the stink off my hands."

It's great to see that the book's getting around!

Holy Land: 3 Nominations for Cold Front's 2008 Year in Review :)

In the foreshadow (or foreskin) of Obama's inauguration (it's great to see and feel so much excitement around me--the audacity of hope!-- but I hope it's not premature ejaculation. but, o, well, anyways, it's great to hope.) I am very happy and excited to see that Holy Land gets three 3 nodds in Cold Front's 2008 Year in Review Nominations.

Holy Land (or poems therein) are included in

1) Best New Book 2008
Holy Land

2) Best Opening Lines

"There’s a child in a ditch by the side of the road. She’s the source of every drop of blood. Shadows, knives, machetes—angels sharpening the horns of beasts you’ll never see…"

3) Best Thirteenth Poem
(The Artifact itself)

Thanks again to Black Ocean for producing a beautiful little book!

to see all of the nominations go to Cold Front
http://reviews.coldfrontmag.com/2008-year-in-review.html

(sorry, but from this computer i can't seem to link it directly....)