A new issue of Boog City is up with my interview with Argos Books.  You can read it here. Argos Books is also the featured press for the d.a. levy lives portion of the Welcome to Boog City Poetry Festival this weekend.

The full line up for the festival this weekend can be found here.

I had a pretty good time at AWP, was definitely in need of a break from my routine.Even though it is cheesy to admit, it is inspiring spend the weekend among writers and hear new people read.

The real challenge now is to hang on to that motivation.

Next week is AWP, and even though it is in D.C. this year (aka the belly of the beast), I am still excited to go spend the weekend with poets.

I am reading on Thursday night at the D.C. Arts Center for Bloof Books.  Facebook invite here.

In other news, Stacey Tran’s chapbook Fake Haiku is hot off the presses, literally. Me and the rest of the letterpress team have been working on this chapbook since September.  We are so happy it’s done! Many thanks to Wendy’s Subway for providing the space and resources, to Emily Toder for teaching us how to use a letter press, and of course to Stacey for sending us her writing and trusting us with her work!

In #resistance news, I’ve been making phone calls today and leaving voicemails with scripts provided by 5calls.org. I also came across this free fax service faxZero from a friend on Facebook. You can send up to five free faxes (via email!) a day to folks in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Write whatever you want in the text box, but “No to DeVos” seems to be trending.

In solidarity.

Soundtrack for our presidential transition. Fuck yea.

It’s been a minute but I have some new-ish poems up at Gramma this week.  You can read them here. It feels good to have some new poems out in the world.

It’s hard to believe that this Friday is Inauguration Day. Though I am not making the trek to DC, I will be participating in the Women’s March on NYC this Saturday with my husband and some friends.

It feels important to me to be there. To be a human and a citizen in that space. I don’t know what the next four years are going to be like but I do know that without those of us who are willing to stand up and protect our civil liberties we will be lost. Hope you will join us, if not in person, then in spirit.

Said the Gramophone is a music blog that is roughly 13 years old. I am a roughly 35 year old woman, who has been sitting behind similar yet different desks for roughly 10 years. Almost the entirety of those 10 years I have been checking out and falling behind with checking our STG’s weekly postings, which means I was around 25 when STG first came into my life. It’s weird to think I’ve been reading/listening to STG for nearly 10 years, but the extent to which I am grateful for its existence has only increased.

I love learning about new music. I love learning how artists overlap. I also love reading writing about music, whether it be quasi-objective writing or meandering, emotional, and memory-based writing. No one does it better than STG. STG was one of my inspirations for starting Song of the Week over six years ago. Where does the time go? Even though my life has changed a lot in the last 10 years it also feels like it hasn’t really changed at all. Is that what getting older is?

Anyway, if you are looking for something to ease you into 2017 or if you are looking for a reason to continue into 2017 or if you are just looking for company and connection and a sense of newness you should check out STG’s founder Sean Michaels’ Best Songs of 2016.

One of my favorite writings so far is for number 53. D.R.A.M. ft Lil Yachty – “Broccoli” – “Someone give a Grammy to “Broccoli”‘s loopy, idiotic flute part, the one winding round D.R.A.M.’s grin. Don’t give a Grammy to Lil Yachty, who almost sinks this song.  If Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song is out there somewhere, “Broccoli” is playing in the elevator.” 

It’s enough to make you forget that this guy who looks eerily appropriate as SPAM  is going to be our president.

via Eater

I don’t know guys. Life already feels sort of overwhelming to me but I guess I just need to try harder in 2017. I guess we all do.

Even though I HATE the titles on this record, I am really feeling the new Bon Iver record 22, A Million. This song feels apt today.

In other news, here are the first two issues of Boog City that I conducted interviews for. The first one has an interview with Dikembe Press and the second on has an interview with 421 Atlanta.

Also, Sunday December 11 is the 14th annual New York City Small Presses Night. I am co-curating the event with David Kirschenbaum. Presses being featured include:

So, I wrote this personal essay about Brett Fletcher Lauer’s book Fake Missed Connections and it was published today on Entropy. I feel pretty happy about this essay, despite its personal nature.  It felt like something that I needed to write.

Also, amazingly, my chapbook Office Work was re-printed!

So many and forever thanks to Greying Ghost Press. It’s really a lovely surprise to re-encounter these poems.  My poem-ing lately has felt sort of strange and disjointed so I am grateful for this reminder of a different time.

What else? It’s Friday and I am working for the weekend, trying to set up some Boog City stuff, and am off to do some letterpress work at Wendy’s Subway in a little bit. Not a bad way to end the week I guess.

Some updates, old and new.

This summer me and a few others will be working with Wendy’s Subway, a non-profit library and writing space in Bushwick, to print a mini-manuscript (less than 300 words) on letterpress.  We held an open call for submissions in June and got a bunch of really interesting stuff but decided to go with Stacey Tran‘s Fake Haiku. We also decided to make a broadside featuring an excerpt from Bridget Talone’s manuscript, The Soft Palate, in 2017. I am really excited about learning to work with the letterpress and to have a group poetry project to be working on again.  Reading all of the submissions and subsequently talking about them made me realized how much I miss being an editor for a literary magazine.

Also, I don’t know why it’s taken me so long to share this, but I wrote a little blurb for Alex Crowley’s chapbook Improper Maps. I was incredibly humbled to be ask to write this blurb. The chapbook is great! Congrats to Alex!

Oh, and I am taking over as Small Press Editor for Boog City, a community art/poetry newspaper based in the East Village.  I’ve had some of my writing appear in Boog City in the past, and I’ve read for Boog City many times, so it’s cool that I will be able to contribute to the paper in a different way. I am already working on my first interview with the Portland-based press Dikembe. I really enjoy doing this sort of stuff.  I need to figure out how to incorporate it more into my life!

And as for the future, well who knows. But it’s there and ever changing and I’m excited about it.

I found out last week that my manuscript “Everything is Always Wonderful if it is Almost Over” was a finalist with honorable mention for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book competition.  I feel really happy about this! It’s just as good as winning and couldn’t have come at a better time.  I have been feeling a little disconnected from (my) poetry so it’s lovely to have my manuscript be acknowledged. Onward it is.