my throat is a lovely murder

"Soon, / I'm a treble clef, a tangle, / all white hair and ribbons, / the sky gone up like burning copper."

 - "carnival season"

I realized today that I nearly missed another book birthday...girl show, the third book I wrote, the fourth one published, debuted in February 2014.  There was a long haul between when the book was finished as my thesis in 2007 and when it was actually released.  It had initially been snapped up by Ghost Road, the publisher of my my first collection, but the press folded in 2010 and left it back in my lap.  Later that year, I sent it to Black Lawrence, who wound up accepting it the following year.  I always think about how it was almost a good thing--the press closing and landing with another, even better, publisher with a huger audience, but at the time I was sort of listless in my writing pursuits and not sure the book was ever going to happen.  It had been a fallow period, post MFA, and my attention was everywhere but writing.

girl show was conceived around 2005, when I had completed an early set of collages (not so great) under the title and wrote the title poem.  They were never really meant to go together, really, my mind not yet toward combining text and image, but both partially inspired by AW Stencell's GIRL SHOW:  INTO THE CANVAS WORLD OF BUMP & GRIND. That first poem came pretty easy, the rest of the book hard, but I knew I had my title then and there even if I barely had a project.  Over the next couple years, as I finished my MFA, I finished the poems.  By the fall of 2006, when I landed in my thesis seminar, I had most of the entire book written. With the help of my classmates, I had wrangled it into three sections by spring and it was pretty much finished.. I did a little tweaking in the spring at the bequest of my advisor to get approval (much of which I later undid before sending it out for publication, angry that it took me so long to realize that know my own work best).  Somewhere in the bowels of Library archives, there is the version I turned in for the degree, but then there is the version that exists in print. (*note to future lit scholars in the event I ever become famous, just burn that one, kay?..lol..)

"My body will go on giving /  things up: pink scarves and the ace of spades."

-"dissassembling maria"

I sent it to Ghost Road later that year, who had done an amazing job with the fever almanac, but the press was already on the verge of dissolving.  The editor I'd primarily worked on the book with and who'd enthusiastically accepted the second, had left by 2008, and though the existing editor had tried to make a go alone, health issues forced him to shutter. It's a common story in a world where such presses exist woefully underfunded and understaffed.  I was devastated, of course, but, because of my feelings toward poetry and po-biz at that time, not all that worried about it.  I did divide it up and submitted part as a chap, that placed as a finalist in a journal contest, but the only other place I sent the full mss to was Black Lawrence.

I'm so happy that they picked it up, and that it started this amazing relationship with that press that has already produced two books, and a third coming next spring.  When it came time to choose the cover, I had been working on my spectacle series of paper cut-outs, and somehow the bareback rider just seemed very right to grace the cover of the project. I also got some amazing blurbs from two of my favorite poets, Mary Ann Samyn and Carol Guess. There are a couple things that distinguish girl show from other projects, one that it's one of the last projects that was mostly verse.  I had already started writing mostly prose poems in the intervening years.  Also, it was probably my most intensely researched (I even thanked my my bestie/boss Jen for pointing me in the right direction when it came to source material.)  Most of the carnival women were inspired by real life stories.  

Perhaps one of the more important things about this book, was that it's acceptance re-ignited my writing passions and gave me impetus to continue.  It was accepted in the fall of 2011, a point when I was very much occupied with other things (press doings, shop doings, unrequited love dramas) and I suddenly was able to snap a bit more back into focus (ironically with a very unserious project with the James Franco letters, but it worked.)  And soon I was writing the shipwrecks of lake michigan poems and I was on a roll.   It probably just gave me hope that I was still on the right path, despite the enthusiasm I lost post MFA and the way I felt very anxious about writing, but also anxious about not writing.

*get a copy of girl show here at the Black Lawrence site..
*read a review at American Microreviews and Interviews
* sample at Verse Daily

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