Thank You

To everyone, so so much, for preordering my book. It was really something. I was gone for the &now conference in Buffalo, and I didn't really check email while I was there. So I was surprised when I got home and saw so many people had come through to buy this thing. All that, and no little amount of thanks to everyone who preordered from the Orange Alert Press website, as well. I'm going to leave this button up here by the book's cover for a little while, so if others come through here and order, I'll send the book with the chapbook still--same price.

I actually really hate that part of the writing deal: pimpin yourself. I used to sell suits for the Men's Wearhouse, and I hated that job, too. Corporate offices there said salespeople had to have a certain percentage of over-$500 sales. We also had to have a percentage of "multiple shoulder garment" sales, which means you had to sell more than one suit or one sport coat to single customers. This = high-pressure sales. If you've ever gone to the Men's Wearhouse, you know what I'm talking about. When I was working there I started feeling like a scumbag. Towards the end, they made us go to a weeklong training seminar in Santa Cruz, which is near my hometown. I had my buddy Randy pick me up when the bus dropped us off there. I stayed with my friends and family for that week (getting paid) and Randy dropped me off again when the bus was to drive us back to Reno. I figured I'd screw them back for them screwing their customers. A week later I quit.

I had a great time at the &now conference. Really, I needed a couple-days' break from teaching. I cancelled classes. I'm realizing that when I go to conferences I'm really there to see other writers who are friends, and to talk with them about what we do, and to drink beer. I also like to look at and buy books at the book fairs and enjoy a reading or two. But I can't overdo readings, and I'm pretty much done on panels. With panels, I think I realized that after going to AWP for the third time. Anyway, it was good to see some friends, and have some drunk lady at a bar give me some of her weed, which was funny.

All that, and I reading tonight. So if you're in the Columbus, Georgia area, come out to Columbus State University, to the Sarah D. Spencer Event Hall at 7 PM for a reading and craft talk. I'm going to talk about writing sentences, and research in writing, and I'll read from the book. I might read some new stuff too. I don't know yet.

In the last few days of the presale

I'm offering two books for the price (which is already discounted!) of one!!!!

On October 20th Prose. Poems. a Novel. is officially released by Orange Alert Press. From now til then, all those who preorder through this site I'll sign their copy of the book, and include a signed copy of my When I Moved to Nevada chapbook, which was published last summer by The Greying Ghost Press. There's no secret here: When I Moved to Nevada is INCLUDED (as one of the sections) of Prose. Poems. a Novel, but, clearly, if you don't already own that--or any of the other beautiful books Carl Annarummo has created, then you really need to. Some of my favorite short books by some of my favorite contemporary writers come from The Greying Ghost: Shane Jones, Allen Bramhall, Kathryn Regina, Laura Carter---others, others others. So, just to hold the work that Carl produced--long before the idea of PPN existed--is worth it. And it's free!

After October 20th, the book will be $14. For $12, I'll send both. If you're thinking, well, fuck the chapbook, that's fine; you can still preorder PPN at the Orange Alert Press website.

a cat can't live off books alone

My copies arrived! I'm stoked. The book looks great. I had to fix a few things from the galleys. "Irreverent" in one of the blurbs got misspelled as "irrevernet," which I admit was kind of of cool. Irrevernet is irreverent internet stuff.

And of blurbs, this is what they say:

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 Prose: Poems, a Novel. But she didn’t. Jamie Iredell did, and in reading this lean but dense meat-eater of a sui generis story cycle, one realizes there might still be a way for books to compete with porn.

— Blake Butler, author of Ever and Scorch Atlas

Absorbing, fascinating, strange in the best way. This “novel” reinvents the novel, the short-short story and the prose poem, at the same time. Iredell’s spiritual uncle, Richard Brautigan, is happy in heaven, drinking with Raymond Carver, who’s happy too. A delightful book.

— Tom Franklin, author of Poachers, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk

Jamie Iredell’s wonderful command of rhythm—the hypnotic, irresistible way his sentences push the reader to the places they could not imagine going on their own—makes it impossible to stop reading until you reach the end. This novel, these stories, these poems, defy classifi cation and demand your attention.

— Kevin Wilson, author of Tunneling to the Center of the Earth

Jamie Iredell’s prose poems (a form that’s been mostly dormant the past 30 years or so, but is making a big comeback in the hands of many younger poets) are among the most unique I have read: quirky, irreverent, surprising, funny. Welcome back the form and hat’s off to this splendid new practitioner of it!

— Thomas Lux

Eggs and other stuff

My favorite story in How Some People Like Their Eggs is "Coffee Pot Tree." The story features a retrospective first person narrator, looking back on the days leading up to when the tree was "topped, dropped, and carted away." I like how this story, through the narrator, creates a complete sense of suburbia. There's the "secretary for the Neighborhood Advisory and Recreation Committee [NARC]," there's lawn winterizing and leaf-blowing, and there are "domestic rodents." I also love the simple acceptance from the story's start that the "coffee pot tree" is exactly what it sounds like it is, no trick about it. You simply accept that at the story's beginning. And, as a tree, it functions (that is, for humans) no different than a live oak or ponderosa pine, and the narrator misses its leaves rustling in the wind, its coffee pots turning the tree into a wind chime. He thinks about days earlier, when the tree had cast shade and been the subject of conversation. And at the story's close he's slurping down the dregs of a wayward coffee pot abandoned in his lawn after the felling. It's a "coffee pot tree," and a tree. The narrator's saddened that the tree must come down since the NARC decided that it had become "a general menace to suburban equilibrium." This makes me think of the story as a kind of outline of nature one and nature two. We have to distinguish what we mean when we talk about "nature." And the story comments on this. By nature one we mean an abstracted kind of nature, the nature we think of when we think of the universe as a system of order drawn out of chaos. Our abstract notion of the idea of gravity, for example, is what we mean when we talk about the nature of celestial bodies. And we mean by nature one the non human-adulterated natural world. By nature two we mean the natural world as construed by humans. Our romantic associations with nature, for example, are a psychological manifestation of nature two. We can also look at nature two as the human-impacted natural world. Space junk in orbit around the planet, your sewer system, a suburb. What are our relationships to the natural world around us, and how should those relationships be refereed? I think there's a current of the natural world underlying this chapbook. Maybe it's because Sean runs through and plays in the woods a lot. Maybe that's too much a "life and letters" way of looking at this. Nonetheless, the book is serious, even if it's funny (as the NARC, here, in "Coffee Pot Tree" evinces), and it's asking serious questions about us, and what the hell we are doing. What you should do is buy it, the book, that is.