i burn like nothing you've seen
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In my reminiscing about the end of my MFA years and the impossibility of that being a stretch of 15 years ago, I also have to give a nod to some of the projects I released that year, which not only included my FEIGN chapbook I mentioned a while back, but a couple other fun things, including my Joseph Cornell project, which I am planning a longer post on, but there was also this short little chap of poems that set the tone for what would be my next manuscript after my thesis.
brief history of girl as match was initially issued as part of the awesome little Dusie E-Kollectiv, which I later took part in again with terrestrial animal in 2014. While that year, we did swaps at AWP in Seattle, in 2007, it was solely through the mail, which meant I spent a whole month getting chaps in my lonely mailbox from writers who would later become some of my favorites (and some would even later be dgp authors.) The physical edition, which was pretty small, was a tiny little square chap with only a dozen poems. The chaps were also later published electronically online for all to see, so you can see an electronic version here.
Most of the pieces were written in that final year of grad school, sort of around the poems I was writing for girl show, which was fairly locked in in terms of subject matter and theme. I feel like since 2004 or so, I've very much been a project poet who sticks to one thing at a time, but sometimes there are a couple different things happening at once and I go back and forth. Those couple years though, it felt like I had many projects and balls in the air for various courses I was taking. These were an exception, not really written to fit into anything or for any particular class-related project, most of them written in spring of 2007, though a couple might date from before (a couple were from my poetry forms class in 2006--the litany and epistolary poems in particular.)
What it ends up being is a short little study on women as muses vs. women as creators, which was something I was particularly interested in that year, as well as setting the stage for the next non-project book I would write, major characters in minor films. Though I wasn't sure for a while I would actually ever write another full-length collection, these formed a spine for that book and a general direction.
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