book birthday | sex & violence
On the very first day of June five years ago, this little book dropped into the world in the form of a box of copies left downstairs. Chicago was literally on fire from protests (which I still think were outside agitators, rather than the Chicagoans who had been protesting Friday and most of Saturday without incidence.) What would follow was curfews that lasted a couple of weeks and increased policing on Michigan Ave for a couple more years. In the thick of Covid lockdowns, that morning, I sat in a zoom meeting, in which a bunch of librarians fretted over return protocols coming a month later despite not a single one of them actually returning to the office during the remaining year and a half I still worked there after. I wound up texting my boss to say I was taking the day off and depression napping, but later I went to fetch the cat litter downstairs and found my newest book. It was a moment that should have been one of celebration, but I wasn't feeling it. In the coming months I did my best to market the book, making my first video poems and web content, but it was hard to get traction. In retrospect, it was last traditionally published book I published before moving on to issuing titles myself a year later (after what I like to call now the "Poetry Mid-Life Crises of 2020" ).
This bones of SEX & VIOLENCE started in early 2015 with the blond joke poems, and through 2016 with the Plath centos gleaned from lines in ARIEL. It continued through slasher movie fragments and what was initially J's Valentine's love poem series from 2017, but which broadened over the next few months and took on a life of its own. Right after I lost my mom, I sat down to send it in time for the end of the month deadline BLP had for new submissions. When the acceptance came during the early spring, I sat and cried at my desk over not being able to tell her first thing.
The time since that first spring without her and lockdowns/riots to now, five years later, always feels like it is collapsing in on itself. In 2018, even in 2020, I would not have told you that I would end up leaving the library to write full-time, or maybe even that such a thing was possible. I would not have quite believed I would be planning a wedding, or publishing my eighth title out here on my own. I would also not have believed democracy would be in a crisis, but then again, there were signs. My days are different now than they were, even in the mist of lockdowns, when so much energy went to making myself indispensable to a job that ultimately neither appreciated my talents or paid me enough to really live. Ultimately a way of life that I was sustaining that wasn't really sustainable (and this was true long before the pandemic, but it took the whiplash of that time to see it and make changes accordingly. The girl who submitted the book that arrived that summer day was not the girl who had submitted it in the fall of 2017, nor was she the girl that wrote it in the years leading up to that. She is definitely foreign to me now, though I see some of the things I most like about my current work just under the surface of those poems.
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