Snowy and windy and blizzardly as it was, today was a very good day, a day when I finally got my hands on something that has been quite a while in coming. Something so shiny and lovely and beautifully designed, I could barely contain myself. The book that was started in 2005, finished two years later as my MFA thesis, and then just waiting to show itself to you over the past seven years. The poems seem a little foreign to me and probably nothing like what I'm writing now (mostly prose poems), and I've mostly avoided reading them at readings or looking them over too much, lest I get tired of them before I actually have to promote the book. So it's almost like reading someone else's book. Maybe the someone I was circa 2006, that last surrealistic year of grad school, when I was very productive but also sick and very much stupidly in love with someone I should not have been. (there is a little bit of that relationship in here, though more of it in major characters in minor films.) The person who pored over books on sideshow/circus history, 1930's midwesterness, was furiously writing poems about siamese twins and mermaid women and bareback riders.
That person always feels a little bit like a stranger, but I still love these poems..
