I just read a zig-zagging set of stanzas conveying the prismatic ecological vision of Jennifer Howard (I’ll include them at the end of this post) in Toward Some Air, ed. by Fred Wah & Amy De’ath. They bowled me over, and I hung out somewhere between procrastinating and giving myself what I needed in the post-anesthesia haze of a medical procedure before realizing this post is too late. It was supposed to be about ephemera and now that ephemera is gone. So I guess it still is.

Thom at Blue Bag Press asked me to send some poems late in 2024. I figured they might like something rowdy and less classifiable, so I took up a snarl of poems about my body breaking down (see above medical procedure), disability, imperialism, waste, rage (some are titled “hatred”) and fugitive desires and sent them along. I like the poems but they’re challenging, the kind of poems where you let it all hang out and that become your favorite because most places wont give them a home. Thom took them–a real gift. Now they’re a print object called Shit, Slips. Thom had them printed by Alex Benedict of betweenthehighway on receipt tape paper. If you have one, please wrap them around a toilet paper tube cut to size while watching Zend’s toiletters revolve.

They were released Saturday at Rust Belt Books. The party included readings by Rachelle Toarmino (fantastic, layered piece about Love Canal) & Thom Eichelberger-Young, whose documentary poetics are incorporating the twists and turns of this grotesque moment at lightning speed and at compelling analytical angles. There’s a lot more to say about surveillance poetics right now and some that get said in a conversation hosted by Rachel Myers between Thom and R.M. Haines

Ah, yeah, & Diego Espíritu gave a wildly generous introduction that grounded the poems in a poetics of the body. As happens in Buffalo, it was more than an introduction but a portable theory of poetry that exceeds what it describes, opening doors for people listening closely to their poems.

The dank poems got read. Afterward, all but two of the fifty copies were spoken for. & that’s it. Ephemera.

We raised about $70 for the Sameer Project. Just a drop in the ocean of what’s needed in the face of the heinous U/./S./-I/s/r/a/e/l siege, slaughter, and starvation, in the face of their perverse “aid” distribution plan [& if that’s “aid” then the people got fed in Pinochet’s dungeons before being disappeared were also in aid distribution centers and cemeteries are hospitals and bombs are instruments of compassion].

Anyway, if you donate $30 to the Sameer Project and send me the receipt, I’ll mail you one of the two remaining copies of Shit, Slips. Though maybe Alex still has a few?

In hopes you pursue the whole poem, here are the lines from Jennifer Howard:

in any opiate moment

unlatch the skull of a lake zaagai’igan

from its trophy of red snow

we’re in this

for the killing jaaginazh fields

of every biome

our prosperity zhawendaagozi

a glimmering clusterfuck dryad

felled into the horizon