Three Things #8: Preorder your copy of Vessels
It’s a short one this time round, so let’s get right to it, shall we?
1. Solstice to Solstice
Vessels won’t come out until right before the southern Summer solstice in December. But last week, just after the northern Summer solstice, it became available for preorder.
Yes: you now can actually buy my book!
For the moment, it’s only available directly from my publisher (which, for small presses, remains perhaps the best way to buy their books). I’ll let you know once it becomes available through other channels—from your local bookstore, for example (you do have a local bookstore that you support, of course, right?), or perhaps from the delightful Bookshop.org, or (if your soul is shriveled and macerated by the sickly sweet corruption of late Capitalism) from dystopian online retailers named after South American rivers. Etc.
2. The Maker of this earth but patented a leaf
If you follow the link above, you will also be treated to your first glimpse of the cover.
Until you’ve read the book, you can’t grasp just how perfect that image is. It evokes blood vessels and dry river beds while also being quite obviously a decaying leaf. There’s lots of blood in Vessels, and parched deserts, but also lots and lots of leaves. A significant image in both the opening and closing poems is, in fact, a leaf.
But I must admit, I sort of regret that I never pursued my ideal cover image: Three Worlds by M.C. Escher. It would have been so utterly perfect, but the process of getting permission was just too much. Maybe for the 25th anniversary variorum edition?
3. And this is the record of the time
There has been a trend lately of authors releasing playlists for their books. Since I was constantly making mixtapes as a teenager in the eighties, I decided to put one together for Vessels.
It ended up running five hours.
I eventually pared it down to a bit over three hours, breaking it into three parts, to correspond (very loosely) to each section in the book. Some of the music was composed using methods similar to what I used to write Vessels; other pieces explore themes in the lyrics similar to what I was reaching for in the poems; some songs were from albums I was listening to a lot while writing and editing; and some just have vibes that harmonize with the book's mood.
The playlist is—in my humble and completely unbiased opinion—absolutely brilliant and I’m sure you’d all love it so much that you’d have it on endless repeat and it would become your constant summer jam mixtape for 2024.
But I don’t have an account with any of those exploitative streaming services like Spotify or Apple Music, so I don’t really have a way of actually sharing the stupid thing with all of you here in the profligately digital twenty-first century.
Hm. Can you make sharable playlists on Bandcamp (assuming I can find all the tracks there)? Oh: maybe a Youtube playlist. It’s so crazy, it just might work. Please stand by.
Until next time!