034: A New Book?? A New Book!!

AN EMAIL IN SEVERAL PARTS, CURIOSLY SENT ON A SATURDAY EVENING

First, Tha NEWS.

What? WHAT? Yup, I finally finished my first foray into self-publishing--both a paperback and an ebook. The ebook is up for presale right now, at a special half-price rate, and it will go live on September 1st. Amazon's Print-on-Demand timelines are a little fuzzy, but I'll be pushing the big red button on that one around the same time. I will, of course, let you all know when that happens.

This book is a full-size poetry volume, collecting things from before I'd even formally pursued poetry, through my entire career, even up til this past year. Coming in at over 70 pages, it's more than double the size of A Void and Cloudless Sky, and because the only middleman on this one is Mr. Bezos, the price is in fact LESS than that book, too. No one to take credit for my layout, no one else taking credit for my marketing, and no one taking credit for the production. It's a one-person project (not including Amazon's infrastructure, obviously.) I really hope you give it a shot. There are poems in here I consider some of my best work, even the early ones.

confessions... has been percolating for a while; the title itself came during a brainstorming session with my partner while trying to come up with joint artistic projects. The idea was to come up with something trying to document all the ways small-town life fucks us up (the initial spark was a poem I wrote about a cop that shot at a dog in my hometown, the first time an officer that had fired a sidearm on duty in decades, which ironically didn't even make the final cut) and sneaks in some of the realities of that sort of insularity.

So yeah. confessions from a drainage ditch. Did you know you can get tetanus from floodwaters?

Second, INTERLUDE.

Third, CONSUMPTION.
- Friend of the program Bram E. Gieben, aka t3xtur3, was recently featured by The Scotsman for their Scotsman Sessions series, performing his track "Non-Zero". The man continues to get better, and continues to inspire.
- Another friend of the program, Meredith Yayanos, has been working for over a year on a Kickstarter for seminal and strange Bay Area art/rock project Sleepytime Gorilla Museum. While the KS itself has hit its minimum funding goal, they are a big-thinking bunch and any support you put behind them will be put to use reviving and finishing a long-percolating project.

Fourth, HUSTLE.
Obviously, there's the aforementioned new book.

As a subscriber to this here newsletter, you get access to a pdf version of A Void and Cloudless Sky for free. Fuck the man, have my overpriced book for free. (If you want a hard copy, you can check it out at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.)

I'd love for you to check out my Patreon, which is basically the thing that enables all this. (By "all this" I mean webhosting, an occasional contest entry, and/or literally putting food in my mouth.) There's levels from as little as $1 up to $50 and what you get varies, but you can get poems written just for you to your spec.

Finally, THE OUTRO.
My kiddo baked chocolate chip cookies. They're kind of amazing, both the kiddo and the cookies. They just started their last year of high school, wherein they're taking a zillion rad classes on top of their extracurriculars of theatre and Pride Club and not-school-related junior roller derby.

I have an almost-legal-adult in my household.

I still find it impossible to envision my parents at my age, even though I was, y'know, there. Life is weird.