ZERO

Okay so for about a week now there have been "0" of my books at SPD, and they're sending more books, soon, but that only gives people the choice of Amazon, which is evil (although I ordered Coeur de Lion on Amazon today! because I had no choice!) So if you want a copy email me on my francesfarmer email, and you can send me a check or something and I will send you the book promptly. Or maybe we can trade. We'll work something out.

Oh and also if you were supposed to receive a review copy of O Fallen Angel and haven't yet, the books went to the Twilight Zone I think so they're being resent. So let me know if you don't get it in a week or so. YO. 

The lit blog We Who Are About To Die asked me to review O Fallen Angel, and I worked on that today, and absolutely savaged myself, which was actually really cathartic. I will post if they publish it, it's pretty grotesque and far out, so we'll see.

ohmigod

i psychotically want to read laurie weeks' zipper mouth, coming out in august through alyson books. can alyson books send me a review copy? pretty pretty please? i might try to officially review it. i am editing july for everyday genius and in the back of my head i kept on thinking of this letter to sylvia plath i had read in vice's literary issue like years ago, that is from weeks' book,  along with the excerpt from tao lin's shoplifting from american apparel. i sat there on the toilet and read them both, and felt something.

Anyway, Sylvia, I’ve been tortured about dying for years, ever since reading Little Women made me realize we’re all doomed and ruined my life. But, one day however, I opened your book THE BELL JAR and literally died of shock. For the first time I saw someone in a book portraying emotions that were exactly mine, I never even knew it was okay to write about them! I never would have figured it out by myself. Like when you said how the tulips were breathing I realized I always saw them breathing too but I was in denial.

everything i was trying to do with my monkey character but so so better. today is the day of an anxiety of influence and authorship. both. X2whammy

Johannes Goransson

Way back way back when (all of like six months ago) when I wrote an essay about Bataille & Henry Miller being male hysterics, Johannes Goransson wrote me and said that some people have considered his poetry to be in the mode of the male hysteric. And I've just read this morning his collection a new quarantine will take my place and oh it is so wildly bananas and yes completely hysterical associative bulimic bodily feminine. I'm really quite in love with it. And completely fitting into my essay I'm working on on the bulimic, extending and considering what I've written before, thinking about cleanliness in literature, purity, what can be cut away in the workshop, and Goransson in this collection is revolting madly and wildly against that. "'Why do you always have to ruin your poems with/ all this excess?' writes my former teacher who is/teaching herself to death in the soggy Northwest."

Yes it is hysterical so emotional so in excess so babbling wild this shouldn't surprise me because of what he and Joyelle put out at Action Books Lara Glenum and Killing Kanoko and what he advances/argues for in his aesthetic essays on Exoskeleton but in a way surprises me  because of the forceful rhetorical brilliance of Goransson's' essays (check out his essays as well as James Pates' on Exoskeleton, this morning I am rereading James' essay on the political grotesque and on Bacon/Beckett/Deleuze's chapter on Hysteria. Also I reread Kate Durbin's essay today, and feel like basically it's everything I want to write about, which is intimidating me as well. All this brilliance!) But Johannes' poems are completely different, so much in the mode of completely bonkers mad.

from PIG CIRCUS:

I used to be stereotyped for my ambulance good looks/and a smile that says "I just stabbed my thigh with the/sharp/end of a compass" like no other reference to the/vaudeville era."

the aptly named OBSCENITY CAN BE A FORM OF ASCETICISM, so wildly wonderfully associative:

I keep mentioning my torso because I wish I were a/zoologist. I wish I were a surgeon. Or Darwin. Or a /ballet impresario in Paris. Or a mole in the ground./Or a reptile collector. Or 5000 accidents. Made of/swans. Or Darwin. Or an injury. Or going home/in a wheelbarrow. Or moving into the Hotel Fuck. Or/bleeding slowly into a silver bucket. Or plundering./Most of all I wish I were Darwin.

          Or 5000 accidents.

         Made of swan feathers.

 from AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Once I picked up my/ kitchen knife and played with it in a dangerous and/ pathetically dramatic way.