This reading

below--in the last post--was last night, and it was awesome. If you are in Atlanta but you didn't make it, you are a fag. And by that I mean a cigarette, you stinky, cancerous, British thing you.

solar anus reading this friday @ 7PM

Bruce Covey’s fourth book of poetry, Glass Is Really a Liquid, will be published by No Tell Books in the summer of 2009. He lives in Atlanta, where he teaches at Emory University, edits and publishes Coconut Poetry, and curates the What’s New in Poetry reading series.



Matt DeBenedictis was born in Pittsburgh, PA where at the age of twelve he stole his best friend’s video games. Matt does not remember this once great friend’s name, but he does remember each game of Punch Out he played. Matt is the author of the chapbook A Perfect Disgrace (174 Publishing) and has fiction featured in Lamination Colony, The Ampersand Review, and Shine.

Come hear work from Bruce Covey and Matt Debenedictis this Friday evening at The Beep Beep Gallery in Midtown Atlanta.

There will be beer and wine.

The Beep Beep Gallery is located at 696 Charles Allen Dr. Atlanta, GA 30308.

If you're in town and looking for entertainment that doesn't cost a grip, this is your ticket.

some people really hate this question,

but are you going to AWP? If you're going to AWP, comment on this post, and we should plan to meet up and drink a beer, or something. There are lots people who I know or know of through publications, etc., but I've never met met them. So if you're one of those people, and you want to hang in Chicago, that'd be cool. Let me know.

Corduroy Mtn.

Carl Annarummo at The Greying Ghost Press keeps coming out with beautiful hand-held works of art. Here's the cover of the first print version of The Corduroy Mtn. The GG's lit mag:




This issue is fantastic, with these great writers included:

Peter Berghoef, Shane Jones, Brooklyn Copeland, Forest Roth, Blake Butler, Mandy Billings, Brandon Shimoda, Sommer Browning, Adam Maynard, Joshua Ware, Drew Kalbach, B.J. Love, Kevin Wilson, Kendra Malone, Jac Jemc, and Eric Amling.


Here's a piece I liked (I liked them all, but, you know):

Atlanta--A chapbook now available from Paper Hero Press

Barry Graham and everyone at Paper Hero Press, and their Achilles Chapbook Series, have put together what looks like a great chap for me. I hear it's snowing balls up north, so they're actually putting some copies in the mail for me probably tomorrow. I can't wait to get my hands on it, as it looks pretty kick-ass.


These guys have been really great and easy going--fun to work with. I'm sure this chap will look/feel awesome in real life. So, please, if you will, buy a fucking copy. It's only $4, so even in this economy it shouldn't break the bank. More than anything, though, I'd love it if people read it. If I bought every copy from the press and gave them away I wouldn't care, as long as they got into the hands of people who I know would read it and appreciate it.


I got some great blurbs from friends:

from BLAKE BUTLER:

"If Mary Robison listened to more punk, grew up in Las Vegas in the 80s before the 80s sucked, did whippits while reading Ben Marcus and scrolling the alternative personals for golden lines to crib, she might have exploded into the post-post-Beat sentence index that is Atlanta. But she didn't. Jamie Iredell did, and in reading this lean but dense meat-eater of a sui generis prose poem cycle, one realizes there might still be a way for chapbooks to compete with porn."

from MIKE DOCKINS:

"What in the hell are these things? Stories? Poems? Stoems? Whatever they are, they have (lucky for us) catapulted from the brain, indeed the life, of this epicurean-poet-goon-maniac from Atlanta-via-Reno-via-northern-California. This book (much like the speaker himself) moves with a moody cat, and resolves amidst (and beyond) the sometimes seedy underbelly of Atlanta with its cavernous tavern dives, its ungodly cockroaches, its lust for excess. When you put down this book, you might suffer a hangover. But these pieces simultaneously achieve a sense of bildungsroman (think Joyce, not Sherwood Anderson). The consistency of voice and style here is remarkable, as is Iredell's knack for creative metaphors (think Richard Brautigan). James Iredell has the skillz to pay the billz. Wait, he's a poet so he can't pay his billz. What I mean to say is, he has the skills to throw out the mail and keep scribbling, which is something he is always doing, and doing well."


I hope that this is well-received. If not, then I will threaten people with physical violence.

Sons of the Rapture

I just finished reading Todd Dills's Sons of the Rapture and loved it. There's a lot going on in this book. It's part Southern epic, part Western, part postmodern post-Reconstruction novel, part alcoholic redemptive treatise. All this in a prose that is sometimes eerily reminiscent of Kerouac, but entirely different from J.K. at the same time. I'd been meaning to get to this book earlier, as I picked it up at a reading last November. But, life, you know.


This novel's interesting from a narrative perspective as well. There's an over-arching first person narrative from 30 year-old Billy Jones that's the driving force of the book. Meantime, we get other first person POVs, and third person as well. By the end of the book, however, we learn that Billy's been writing (journal entries at the very least), and he actually addresses the reader, and we have to wonder if--at times--the other POVs aren't simply Billy's alter-egos getting their thoughts out on paper in a moment of drunken genius.


The story climaxes as Johnny Jones--Billy's eccentric and estranged father--drives a small herd of cattle down the freeway into downtown Chicago and ends up in the police's crosshairs. Utterly absurd, but beatifully rendered and completely believable. There's an odd mix in this one. A book you should definitely read.