Morning Mail Call – ZIPPERMOUTH! And more.

You are either literally  – literally  – jumping up and down with joy right now, or you simply don’t know who Laurie Weeks is. And if you don’t know who Laurie Weeks is, well, I envy you. Because before you lies the insane, exhilarating, manic genius discovery of her. After a wait that had many fans sinking in and out of a decades-plus depression, her novel, Zippermouth, has finally arrived, packaged with amazing 70s coolness by The Feminist Press.

I first read Laurie in the pages of Amy Schoulder’s (FP’s current visionary) anthology Cookin’ With Honey: What Literary Lesbians Eat which came out in the 90s and had incredible pieces by Camille Roy (Date Rape Brownies) and Silas Howard and Harry Dodge (how to make perfect nutritional yeast popcorn and they used to date when they were tiny!) Laurie’s piece blew me away: in Nachos From The Edge the narrator, in near-blackout, tries to make nachos with a postcard and a hunk of cheese while ruining their loathsome boyfriend’s stereo with a hammer. It’s incredible. Then I found her in the pages of Eileen Myles’ classic anthology The New Fuck You, a rambling, nightmarish piece called Debbie’s Barium Swallow. You also might have read her letters to Sylvia Plath in an old fiction issue of Vice, and amazingly she came on the 1999 Sister Spit tour and some of my best memories of life are from that month – staying up all night talking to Laurie about Philip K Dick as we drove into Nevada, the sun coming up over the mountains. Laurie’s oeuvre, which she dives into, over her head, in Zippermouth, is addiction – it’s thrill and draw, it’s chaos and desperation, it’s oblivion and obliviousness to reality. It’s a point of view of deep inside the swells of it – wandering, driven, awake all night, picking up weirdos. that gorgeous openness to fucking everything, a spiritual disbelief in the concept of consequences, even as life piles up with them. There’s tons of romantic longing, the impossibility of it encapsulated by segments of letters to movie stars and dead poets. It’s about femaleness as the body and the psyche’s primary damage; as a given of failure and a constant scab. And it’s full of HILARIOUSNESS. A dark and deeply kind, absurd sense of humor is really the point of this book. We’re all damaged, and aren’t we buddies in the wreck of our lives, aren’t we all in on that joke?  In the words of a friend quoted by another friend, we’re all just ‘bodies in space’. You really, really want to share that wild, honest, funny space with Laurie Weeks and now we all get to.

Laurie will read from Zippermouth at RADAR at the LUGGAGE STORE – a LitQuake event, October 12th.

Look what else came in the mail!

Yasmin Golan’s super snazzy and smart Michael Jackson’s Masculinity, in which the multi-talented brainiac, poet, and force behind San Francisco’s innovative Queer Food For Live collective interrogates Michael Jackson’s masculinity – or rather, interrogates we, the readers, on the subject. A series of writing prompts for a class you wish you could take, Yasmin asks Is celibacy gay? Is a soft speaking voice gay? Is cosmetic surgery gay? Is single fatherhood gay? You want this shimmering, lovely little book; get it at michaeljacksonsmasculinity@gmail.com

And look what else:

An advance readers’ copy of Citizen, a volume of poetry by Aaron Shurin, put out by City Lights. You know how a book of poetry is a portal into a personal country, a museum of an individual’s mind (heart?) with it’s own recurring imagery and language and customs. I’m excited to visit Aaron’s, verse which is arranged into solid chunks, paragraphs of poetry exploring the world outside, the city or the country, and the domestic sphere, and like all poets the sphere of the heart. This is not a swansong. I’m living the quiver. Dig it!