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DC I MISS YOU REAL BAD: Mancus, Karl, Wong & Davis This Sun at In Your Ear

In Santa Fe right now. But if I could be here I would.

Facebook Stuff.

I N Y O U R E A R

@ District of Columbia Arts Center
3:00PM, May 20, 2012

JORDAN DAVIS,
STEVEN KARL,
ANGELA VERONICA WONG
&
TONY MANCUS

Please join the In Your Ear Reading Series for a reading by Jordan
Davis, Steven Karl, Angela Veronica Wong, and Tony Mancus at 3PM on
Sunday, May 20, 2012.

JORDAN DAVIS is Poetry Editor of The Nation. His poems and prose have appeared in Poetry, Boston Review, Chicago Review, and American Poetry Review. His books include A Little Gold Book, Million Poems Journal, From Orange to Pink, and POD | Poems on Demand. He divides his time between New York and southeastern Ohio.

STEVEN KARL is the author of the chapbooks, State(s) of Flux, a
collaboration with Joseph Lappie (Peptic Robot Press, 2009)
(Ir)Rational Animals (Flying Guillotine Press, 2010) emissions/ of
(H_NGM_N, 2011) and with Angela Veronica Wong, Don’t Try This On Your Piano or am i standing here with my hair down (Lame House Press, 2012). His poems have recently appeared in or are forthcoming from Forklift, Ohio, We Are So Happy To Know Something, and Everyday Genius. That’s a Unique Online Journal. He is the poetry editor of Sink Review and a news editor for Coldfront Magazine. He lives in New York.

ANGELA VERONICA WONG is the author of a full-length collection of
poems entitled how to survive a hotel fire (Coconut Books 2012) as
well as several chapbooks of poems. She lives in Manhattan and on the
internet at www.angelaveronicawong.com.

TONY MANCUS is co-founder of Flying Guillotine Press. He has two
chapbooks coming out this year – Bye Land with Greying Ghost and Bye
Sea with Ghost Ocean. He works as a test writer and a writing
instructor and lives in Rosslyn with his wife Shannon and their two
cats.

Admission is $5.00.

District of Columbia Arts Center is located at 2438 18th Street NW in
Adams Morgan, Washington, DC, between the Dupont Circle and Woodley Park metro stations. For directions, see the DCAC web site at
http://www.dcartscenter.org/plan_location.htm

 

The photo above is from Steven and Angela’s new chap, which is sitting facedown open style on my shelf getting read as a good break between things:]

And acknowledging distance between your body and the earth seems like a bad idea. And the balancing is the part I could never master, the looking forward, the soft placement of feet, one in front of the other. And to advance, no matter how slow the advancing.

y

No matter how slow the advancing it remains upon us.

An army of ant legs so prodigious it appears as art.

Your face in mind. Eyes’ blinked I believe out of belation.

There’s a guitar in the kitchen. Then you were weren’t.

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THE WORLD WILL DENY IT FOR YOU by Janaka Stucky (Ahsahta, 2012)

Image

Janaka’s book is a flammable mix of compression, directness, and metal.

“The truth is

We are perfect

…

I make with my mouth

The hour of your arrival”

It is a place where desire is an imperative that tests and distorts the self, pushes it into the utmost. There is nothing speculative about these poems. They are not cute. They do not draw images to wink and erase them in a powdery smear. They are not about the contours of the mind thinking itself or grandpa on the hill. They are going to be in the anthology of metal poetry that Gerald proposed once. What up with Trakl and Aase  Berg, with the poems’ sincere, original hells.

“The terrible mountain of needles

A lake of blood souls with human faces

Grow four legs and fall into

All the things we’ve ever done

Have brought us to this very point”

In many ways, I don’t see this book as fitting Ahsahta’s aesthetic. But maybe they’re letting out more rope for this, their new chapbook series. Given how good this collection is, hopefully they won’t real it back in.

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6 AMAZON REVIEWS OF THE CONTAINER STORE: MORE NEEDED

Here is a sampling of the fine to very fine reviews of The Container Store Vols I & II by Joe Hall & Chad Hardy on Amazon.com.

As a consumer, it is incumbent upon you to articulate how this product did or did not meet your expectations. Please write your own review.

Dirk says: “As someone with serious storage needs (I live in a Dutch metropolis most of the year), I have to say this really is as low on the totem pole as one can get. I showed up around a week ago in search of a container to store some of the excess medical supplies I’ve accrued through various conferences over the past year. The exterior of the store should have been enough of a hint. Half the lights in the sign were out, and someone had graffiti-ed the entry display window.”

Tom raves, “Book gave me magic powers based on almost certainly intentional misinterpretation of wishes. Would not recommend. On plus side, poems pretty good.”

MS notes, “As my wife and I passed it–I don’t, now, remember where we were going, only that we didn’t want to go anywhere–there was a woman standing in front of the Container Store, wearing an ascot and a red blazer affixed with a large pendant of tangled gold, arguing with her husband, a short fist of a man. She spoke English in an accent I’ll guess was Armenian, and he did too, and their conversation went like this:

WIFE: We have to go to the Container Store to purchase some organizational materials.
HUSBAND: What?
WIFE: We have to go to the Container Store to purchase some organizational materials.
HUSBAND: What?

Etc.”

Mr. Ditchhook says about the author, “I tolerate such money-grubbing among my more destitute friends (as is plain to see) but abhor it in ultra-rich strangers. However, at this stage Joe is taxing my patience by selling out to those Arkansas bullies. So, buy this book– or these books– if only to burn them outside your next Occupy Walmart protest.”

And R. St Lawrence from Minneapolis lets the world know, “So then, naturally, I ask if she’ll set one aside for me for an hour til I get there. She says, “Our system is not set up to do that.” I tell her that I’ve never head of a store that wouldn’t hold something for a customer for an hour, and again she says, “We have such high volume, our system just isn’t set up to do that.” Huh? Pottery Barn and pretty much every other store will do that. I told her that it doesn’t even involve “the system,” since all she has to do is take one and stick it behind the counter, and again she says, like some kind of robot, “Our system is not set up to do that.””

Finally, one of the authors chimes in with this bit of advice:

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