Video of my 2018 Calamari's Interview & Reading in Erie, PA

On August 28th 2018, on the patio of Calamari's Squid Row restaurant in Erie, Pennsylvania, Thasia Anne Lunger interviewed me prior to my featured reading for Poetry Night at Calamari's, hosted by Chuck Joy. The interview and reading were recorded by videographer Bear Lunger for Thasia Anne's TV show, "Poetry, Prose, and Personalities," broadcast on Erie's Cable Access Media (CAM). 

Poems read:
"John Cage Engaged and Uncaged"
"Unfounded"
"Instrumental"
"From Genesis to Exodus"
"Lens"

Ryan Sagert's interview of me on LCCC's Boom Radio, 11/13/2018

Back in November, Ryan Sagert interviewed me about poetry and more for Lorain County Community College's Boom Radio. I remember being geeked out on coffee at the time. Ha! Now the interview is archived on my MixCloud page and available for eternal listening. Thank you again, Ryan!

Video: Judge Marks in Mansfield, 10/20/2018

Sandra Feen, Dianne Borsenik & me
10/20/2018 at Main Street Books

Many thanks to Voices from the Borderlands for this video of me reading my poem "Judge Marks" on 20 October 2018 during the Borderlands open mic following Concrete Wink's feature at Main Street Books in Mansfield, Ohio!

The title "Judge Marks" is a play on the name Mark Judge, who once upon a time was [in]Justice Brett Kavanaugh's drinking buddy. I wrote the poem after learning of Kavanaugh's confirmation.

Watch: 

https://www.facebook.com/voicesfromtheborderland/videos/520870808412955/

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Awaiting Time by Helen Shepard

Crisis Chronicles Press is very pleased to celebrate the December holidays by publishing Awaiting Time, a duende-infused poetry collection by the inimitable Helen Shepard. 

Where are you?

United States $10.00 USD Elsewhere $13.00 USD

Awaiting Time is 48 pages, perfect bound, 5.5x8.5" and features 37 of Shepard's most engaging works, some in Spanish but mostly in English, including "Listening to Flamenco," "Ilusiones," "Más Ilusiones," "Blood Stains," "Garden of Delights," "I Need to Take Apart My Thoughts," "Circular Reincarnation," "Living with Eternity" and "When Blue Was Green." ISBN: 978-1-64092-974-6. Cover art: Ya tienen asiento by Goya. 

Available for $10 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA.

Helen Shepard of Oberlin, Ohio, taught for decades at Lorain County Community College and retired as an Associate Professor of Spanish. For many years after, she continued giving courses for their Center for Lifelong Learning. Helen has lived all over, from American Samoa to Spain, and traveled extensively. Her previous publications include "Camilo Castelo Branco and the Portuguese Inquisition" in New Horizons in Sephardic Studies. She has presented poetry at Snoetry: A Winter Wordfest, the Cleveland Museum of Art and countless other noteworthy locations. To find out more about Helen, please visit www.helenshepard.com or contact her on Facebook.

50 years after d.a. levy’s death....

Read this piece by Mark S Kuhar at cleveland.com.

Then join us for a poetry reading at levy's grave on November 24th at noon.

New LCCC Radio Interview Tuesday 11/13

I look forward to talking with Ryan Sagert about poetry Tuesday 11/13 at 10 a.m. on Lorain County Community College radio. You can listen in at https://www.lcccradio.com/.

My 1st Reading in the Heart of NYC Will Be on 29 November

Finally home after a fine three-day mini trip (Pittsburgh, PA; Richwood, WV; Pomeroy, OH). I have one more reading scheduled for this year and it's bucket list caliber - my first ever in the heart of New York City, at the KGB Bar's Red Room with Kat Georges and Matthew Hupert. So looking forward to this!

"No Other" live in Kansas City with River Cow Orchestra - 10/13/2018

https://youtu.be/hGKlK-u_vdQ

Here I perform my poem "No Other" accompanied by the River Cow Orchestra during Fountainverse: KC Small Press Poetry Festival on 13 October 2018 at La Esquina in Kansas City, Missouri. Video recorded by Jason Preu (thank you!).

I wrote "No Other" on 30 March 2018 - inspired by Tony Ingrisano's "Far Enemy" - for an Ekphrastacy program at Heights Arts in Cleveland Heights. The poem first appeared in print in The Gasconade Review Presents: Missouri Is a Ghost Shaped Thing, edited by John Dorsey and Jason Ryberg for Spartan Press.

No Other
after Far Enemy by Tony Ingrisano

A wide web of geometry and pixelation
looms over my brick suburban bungalow.

The colors warm and entice me
with creeping florescent sophistication.

I feel them drawing me up and in
while equally I am drawing them inside.

It’s a network of jasmine attraction
bringing untoward craving and resentment,

hate and cruelty from America the beautiful,
Russian bots, unacknowledged racists,

television networks, Amazon.com, nihilism
proponents, penile enhancement specialists,

trolls, moles, sexist pols and ad-mongers,
while the colors of it all bleed into pools

of need and reaction, stupefaction,
failure to listen disguised as debate,

hasty action, dystopian dissatisfaction,
snark disguised as lark and warring factions.

This poem began as an expression of appreciation
for a wide web of precious colors and pixelation

before I met the so-called far enemies
in my bathroom mirror and hardly

recognized them as something other
than other.

Gratitude to Gramercy

Anna and I sign books

If you're in the Columbus area, you can pick up some books of mine - including Oct Tongue and Loss and Foundering - at Gramercy Books in Bexley, Ohio Thanks to Linda Kass for being the perfect host, and also for these photos from my reading with Anna Soter there on Friday evening. 

https://www.gramercybooksbexley.com/

I lean into my reading

I love a packed house

Last readings I have scheduled (2018-2019)

I only have three more readings scheduled for this year and one is Friday night, 10/26, at Gramercy Books Bexley, near Columbus, Ohio, with the incomparable Anna Soter.

The others are 11/4 for the Hell's Lid Reading Series in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and 11/29 at the KGB Bar's Red Room in New York City. I'd love to see you at one of these!

So far I’m resisting planning many events in 2019, although I look forward to the handful I already have scheduled. I expect to have a new book out at some point during the course of the year, however, and will likely set up more events when I have a clearer idea of when that is happening.  

Saturday 23 February in Euclid, Ohio 

The Lake Erie Folk Fest at the Shore Cultural Centre, 291 E. 222nd Street, 44123. 

Sunday 10 March at 3 p.m. in South Euclid, Ohio 

Second Sunday Poets featuring John Burroughs, hosted by Doc Janning at the South Euclid-Lyndhurst Branch of Cuyahoga County Public Library, 1876 S. Green Road, 44121. 

Thursday 14 March in Clarion, Pennsylvania 

More details forthcoming. 

Sunday 17 March in Columbus, Ohio 

Peripatetic Poets, hosted by Doug Rutledge at the St. Stephen's Episcopal Church and University Center, 30 W. Woodruff Avenue, 43210.

30 August through 1 September in New Hartford, Connecticut 
National Beat Poetry Festival. More details forthcoming.

Keep checking back here for updates.

Recalling Ataraxis, 4/22/2018

I've been meaning to post a link to this video for awhile, but other things kept coming up. This clip catches me on 22 April 2018 in the middle of reading my poem "Ataraxis" during the Tongue-in-Groove Poetry Jam hosted by Ray McNiece at the Millard Fillmore Presidential Library in Cleveland's Waterloo district.

View here:
https://www.facebook.com/KleftJaw/videos/1672397019512347/

It was recorded by Frankie Metro of Kleft Jaw Press. Musical accompaniment is by Ray McNiece's Tongue-in-Groove band. I wrote "Ataraxis" in early April 2018 for an Ekphrastacy program at Heights Arts in Cleveland Heights. It was inspired by a work of art by Dana Oldfather entitled Equanimity. The poem was finally published this summer in The Gasconade Review Presents: Missouri Is a Ghost-Shaped Thing by Spartan Press.

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Malformed Confetti by Juliet Cook

Crisis Chronicles Press is delighted to announce the publication of glitter witch Juliet Cook's new darkly delicious full-length poetry collection, Malformed Confetti, on 16 October 2018.

Where are you?

United States $12.00 USD Elsewhere $15.00 USD

All hail the Queen of Grotesque, Juliet Cook! Her imagery is monstrous, distorted and unnatural — an unmistakably unstable mixture of estranged dollcanos and blood. These poems plunge into “your neckline, your mouth, your eyes”— into the absurdities of existence, and Cook can barely contain all that is coming apart, even “a stuck tongue keeps breaking.” Malformed Confetti is alive! And absolutely “plotting an insurrection.”

—Susan Yount, editor of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal

Juliet Cook’s full-length collection, Malformed Confetti, is a visceral examination of the body: bones, blood, teeth, breasts, ovaries, eyes, throat and thighs. Cook’s poetry is elemental grindhouse feminism; confronting what is most difficult with the unblinking eyes of a coroner. Lush and guttural, Cook leads us on a journey through a harrowing cycle of creation and destruction.

—Kelly Boyker, author of Zoonosis and Poetry Editor at Menacing Hedge

In her second full-length collection of poetry, Juliet Cook offers up a menagerie of beaten, bloodied, insect infested, ink ingested, broken girl bits.  Her words cut into the eyes with nettles and burs, leaving nothing but an empty socket, a hole to be filled with desire “rooted in sick compulsion.” Cook stares unflinchingly at the sugar and spice and everything nice to reveal the dark nature of such malformed conceptions of beauty and womanhood.  Each graphic image is threaded with the red yarn of things that are forbidden to say, so Cook cracks the skull open as easily as the shell of an egg.  She stares the darkest horrors of the mind straight in the eye to say “Doesn’t mean I still can’t maneuver up. / Maybe I just don’t want to / with you." Her poems in this collection leave the reader dazzled by blue blood and dead birds made out of the vocabulary of what it means to be a capital P Poet.

—Tracie Morell, author of Matilda's Battle Waltz

Poetry that devours you. That isn’t afraid to put its best twisted doll foot forward. I like to read Juliet’s poetry in the buff because her words keep me modest as I rail against the perversity of playing with shit and all the anorexic nightmares that go along with it. Her pound cake poetry fits perfectly in your misshapen pie hole. Swallow her words like a handful of blue-tinged tacks because there’s no standing on ceremony in this land of ravenous parasites and machinated halos. Her well-chosen and ill-fated albino words aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty as the maggots begin singing an emaciated melody and there’s nothing left but her Tilt-O-Whirl porno star mannerisms. This collection of Malformed Confetti  will leave you in traction as it’s rolled fresh from the oven and acts as a tranquilizer or dark red cloud burst depending on your dissolution or poisoned discord and how prepared you are to walk into the silently screaming fires.

—Charles Cicirella, co-author of Ether Bisque

In Malformed Confetti, Juliet Cook conveys both a rare elegance and grotesque violence simultaneously. This book is unafraid; it is not ashamed. It takes unabashed risks, and turns language into something that is breathing, and alive with vigor. In this landscape of “secret luminarias” the body is devoured like food, and her “tongue unroots from its dank cave”; “bones are tapered syllables” and “hollow flutes.” There is a vulnerability embedded in the anger and gore, and though some may say we are “forbidden to talk about hunger,” Cook speaks of it fearless of her rivals.  

—Lisa M. Cole, author of Dreams of the Living and Heart Full of Tinders

Malformed Confetti by Juliet Cook is 113 pages, perfect bound, 5.5x8.5" and features cover art by Simona Candini. ISBN: 978-1-64092-973-9. Available for $12 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA.

Meet the author:

Tuesday 16 October 2018 at 7 p.m. during Poetry Plus featuring Juliet Cook at Art on Madison, 14203 Madison Avenue in Lakewood, Ohio.

Sunday 11 November at 6 p.m. during Uncloistered Poetry at Calvino's Restaurant & Wine Bar, 3143 W Central Avenue in Toledo, Ohio.

Malformed Confetti book trailer by Susan Yount: 
https://youtu.be/mYcdyX864Ic

Juliet Cook [photo by Darryl Shupe, processed by Cook]

Juliet Cook has been writing poetry for more than 25 years. Her poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines, both online and in print. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently including a collaboration with j/j hastain called "Dive Back Down" (Dancing Girl Press, 2015), an individual collection called "From One Ruined Human to Another" (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, 2018), and with another individual collection, "Another Set of Ripped Out Bloody Pig Tails" forthcoming from The Poet's Haven.

Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX in late 2008, ten years ago now. Her more recent full-length poetry book, A Red Witch, Every Which Way, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016. Her MOST recent individual full-length poetry book is this one, Malformed Confetti.

The poems within Malformed Confetti range from 2008 to 2015. In early 2010, Cook suffered from an unexpected Carotid Artery Dissection, which lead to an Aneurysm which lead to a Stroke. Later in 2010, while on the brink of divorce and temporarily living with her parents, Cook began to assemble and submit an earlier version of this manuscript. As time went on, she revised it, added more recent poems, and rearranged it, forming it into a dissected but interconnected discombobulation of pre-stroke and post-stroke work.

Cook's poetic style has undergone changes over the years, but her passion for poetry lives on.

Cook also sometimes creates semi-abstract painting collage art hybrid creatures.

Cook also runs her own tiny independent press, Blood Pudding Press, which sometimes publishes hand-designed poetry chapbooks and sometimes sells art.

My latest poem, "Judge Marks," featured 10/17 in Winedrunk Sidewalk

I am honored to report that my poem "Judge Marks" is featured today (day 636) in Winedrunk Sidewalk. Many thanks to editor John Grochalski!

For daily resistance poems, follow winedrunksidewalk.blogspot.com.

Permalink to just my poem: here.

And they're still accepting submissions of poems and art as we speak.
SUBMIT2RESIST: winedrunksidewalk@gmail.com.

Neuro testing today, Fountainverse (KC Small Press Poetry Fest) this weekend & Juliet Cook book release 10/16

Before my EEG at the Cleveland Clinic today

Lodgings confirmed for Fountainverse: KC Small Press Poetry Fest this weekend in Missouri! I was unsure until the last minute whether I would actually be able to go because I needed to get Juliet Cook's book done before I left and I've had a packed past few weeks. But we're on track and it's all good. I won't get results for today's neuro testing until the end of the month. Heading out of town tomorrow and coming back Monday. Hope to see you either this weekend in Kansas City or this Tuesday 10/16 at Art on Madison in Lakewood, Ohio, for Poetry Plus Featuring Juliet Cook, where Crisis Chronicles Press will release her highly-anticipated second full-length poetry collection, Malformed Confetti.

Video: John Burroughs 9/28/2018 at Nervous Dog in Akron

Many thanks to Michael DeBenedictis for recording this video of my 28 September reading at Nervous Dog Coffee on Market Street in Akron. The poems included are "Mark This," "Odd Missive," part one of "Lit (Er, a Tour)," "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Identity Crisis."

Video permalink: https://youtu.be/Ro_vFZ82skA.

Crisis Chronicles Press publishes Dodge, Tuck, Roll by Rikki Santer

Crisis Chronicles Press is thrilled to announce the publication of Rikki Santer's new full-length poetry collection—Dodge, Tuck, Roll—on 29 September 2018.
  

Where are you?

United States $15.00 USD Elsewhere $20.00 USD

Dodge, Tuck, Roll is 63 pages, perfect bound, 5.5 x 8.5", featuring cover art by Christine Ruddy. ISBN: 978-1-64092-972-2. Available for $15 from Crisis Chronicles Press, 3431 George Avenue, Parma, Ohio 44134 USA. 

"These poems do indeed 'dodge, tuck, roll' with their unflinching argument that one needs 'another logic' to prevail. What’s to dodge or roll away from? Ultimately, the inevitable 'whirling death girder,' as in waiting for a biopsy while 'godding...for right results,' or sympathizing with a friend about to be widowed again, his 'two wives dealt sentence, paragraph, chapters.' Yes, Santer ponders a fate akin to Job’s with a writerly pun. So where do we find that other logic to ease the way? In just that sort of wit, in starlings, the moon, fireflies, memory of mother in hats, trees, music, in humor like 'the coral flush of flockus plasticus' flamingos, and in art—its lushness and triumphant translations, its 'pact' with 'sorrow,' and ability to limn 'dignity into what was knarled.' Santer finds solace in film and sensory seductions that include food: hence the elegy to Anthony Bourdain, nor does she neglect dreams and a Ouija board for help to peer beyond the beyond. She slows us down and speeds us up with puns, formal patterns, keen insights, striking images—like 'the peach and cream gingham of a ripped party dress,' and musical phrases—my favorite: 'you came to me this morning buoyant in a dream.' Sometimes the sheer density beckons deep reading, yet other times, poems, like 'Uncle Max’s Deli,' speak so clearly we fall right in. There are series of poems here to ride: poems about art, dreams, food, and Betty Boop. What is Betty doing here, you ask? Plenty, with her be-bop slang. This sequence asks us to consider what Betty signifies, that Jazz-Age 'Goth Lolita,' that 'eternal vamp' who, by 'filling in for Lucy,' reminds us how art travels through time to sustain us in the present. Santer has her ears to the airwaves, the ground. She listens to owls who 'know more than they should.' She transcribes vibrations. Come listen."
—Charlene Fix, author of Taking a Walk in My Animal Hat (Bottom Dog Press), Frankenstein’s Flowers (CW Books), Harpo Marx as Trickster (McFarland), and Flowering Bruno: A Dography (XOXOX Press)

"Rikki Santer's Dodge, Tuck, Roll is an eruption of measured delight in a boop-boop-a-doop world. What Elizabeth Spires has called 'the great body of the world'—that great body (and beating heart) is the source of these poems. As the opening poem tells us: 'You dodge and tuck and roll under the whirling death / girder. You do the trick you pose you smile—applause.' Vision is centerstage. And we feel as if we’re in the presence of 'owls / that seem to know more than they should.' Rikki Santer’s poems remind me of an iPhone photograph shoved to life when you press the screen. In the words of the Betty Boop poems: 'She’s in my cortex / this gartered Goth Lolita / eyelashes like knives / crimson bullet lips / dog collar spiked.'"
—Roy Bentley, 2018 finalist for the Miller Williams Poetry Prize for Walking with Eve in the Loved City

Meet and hear Rikki Santer at these upcoming events:

9/29 in Akron, OH — 5:15 p.m. during the High Arts Festival at Uncorked Wine Bar.
10/3 in Youngstown OH — 7:30 p.m. at The Soap Gallery.
10/20 in Mansfield, OH — Borderlands Poetry feat. Concrete Wink at Main Street Books.
11/15 in Columbus, OH — Hometown book launch at The Book Loft of German Village.
11/30 in Athens, OH — Concrete Wink at The Dairy Barn Arts Center.

Rikki Santer has worked as a journalist, a magazine and book editor, cofounder and managing editor of an alternative city newspaper in Cleveland, and a poet-in-the schools. She earned a M.A. degree in journalism from Kent State University and a M.F.A. degree in creative writing from the Ohio State University. Her work has won honors from The Poetry Forum (the William Redding Memorial Contest), Black Lawrence Press (the St. Lawrence Book Award Competition), the Ohio Poetry Association, the National Federation of State Poetry Societies, the Best of Ohio Writer Contest sponsored by the Poets’ & Writers’ League of Greater Cleveland, as well as Pushcart and Ohioana Book Award nominations, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Two of her published poetry collections have explored place: Front Nine (the Hopewell earthworks of Newark, Ohio) and Kahiki Redux (the late Kahiki Supper Club of Columbus, Ohio). Clothesline Logic was published by Pudding House as finalist in their national chapbook competition. She also has published two other full-length collections: Fishing for Rabbits from Kattywompus Press and Make Me That Happy from NightBallet Press.