notes & things | 6/18/2018

This weekend has been unbearably hot, even in the city near the lakefront, let alone in Rockford, where I spent the weekend about two feet from the a/c celebrating father's day and organizing EXQUISITE DAMAGE, which has about 20 existing parts, into something like a cohesive whole to determine what still needs to be written. As such, I have landed back in the city exhausted from poor sleeping in the heat and not really feeling like I had a weekend at all.

I've been doodling flowers in my sketchbook much of late. Twice in the past week, I have inhaled cottonwood seeds on the sidewalk and am any day now expecting to grow a tree. Tonight, huge spats of rain and some cooler air, but I am still very tired.  My new responsibilities (not only learning a system new to me, but transitioning to a system new to the library) also has me anxious and restless during working hours. It will settle no doubt, but there goes some of my low-key summer @ work working mostly on programming. (which will still get done no doubt, just with a little less focus.

My manuscript news last week was that Black Lawrence has indeed picked up SEX & VIOLENCE, the contract of which has been signed, sealed, and delivered and the release date set fir April 2020. This will be the third go-round of working with BLP and I'll most likely be furnishing the cover on this one which will be fun  (GIRL SHOW  was all me, but SALVAGE was an artfully modified stock image.)

As I mentioned on facebook, it still always surprises me that I managed to publish one book, let alone 8 of them.  About 15 years ago, I was just beginning to send out the first serious incarnation of a book (we won't talk about the one before that)  The book that eventually, with a large amount modification over the next couple of years, would become THE FEVER ALMANAC. About half of it ripped out and reformed with new work I was doing in my first year or so of pursuing my MFA.  There were a million blog entries then lamenting my book fever, how I felt like it was never going to happen for me. And really, that first book changed nothing.  But then again, it felt like it changed everything. (Even if the publisher went under and it's out of print.)  There was something formative about the experience of releasing it out into the wild.  It's very serious bookishness--glossiness and slick spine.  The heft of it (well as hefty as slim poetry volume can be. )  How I used to go into the Borders (the only bookstore around with a decent selection of contemporary poetry at the time( and run my fingers over those spines and imagine myself among them (of course, Borders itself would be gone before I even had enough books to really occupy a shelf.)  Even still, at home, every once in a while I line them all up on the shelf with their shiny covers and am amazed that it not only happened that first time, but all the times since...