Overdue Books!

Hi! I call this column overdue books because it is a a romp through this huge stack of books I totally mean to review but it takes me, like, a month or two to get around to! I worry – is it too late? Am I talking to you about books you now already know about? Did I miss the publicity train? And then I think – who cares! The cool thing about books is that you can read them whenever you want! Like, I just this week tore into my Collected Poems of Alan Ginsberg, a book that not only has been sitting on my bookshelf forever, but contains poems written in the 1940s! Books are totally eternal! So, with that giant excuse for my procrastination, let us begin.

Erin Bried is the author of these How To books that are wicked popular – How to Sew a Button and How to Build a Fire. My guess is it is super hard to get an entire book out of sewing a button, which is fairly straightforward, and so these books must have bunches of ultra-handy how-tos packed inside. How to Rock You Baby does in fact tell you how to rock your baby, or a baby you are perhaps nannying or have recently kidnapped. You got to hold them close because those little fuckers can’t hardly see when they’re just born, and you should sway, and if you have a particularly cranky little bad seed you can squat while you sway, and also gaze deep into their half-blind eyes the whole time for extra bonding points. This book looks awesome, especially if you, like me, see a baby in your future and are concerned that you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. It tells you How to Assemble a Nursery (I sort of want to keep my baby in a dresser drawer like a depression-era mother) How to Pack Your Hospital Bag, How to Breathe (like, while there is a baby coming through your vagina), How to Keep Eating Well for Two, How to Change a Diaper (thank you!), How to Cut Tiny Fingernails (because those little bastards will slice up your face with their paper-thin, razor sharp baby talons!), How to Knit Booties (too advanced), How to Make Homemade Blocks (for maximum control over every little thing your child comes in contact with), How to Write a Thank You Card (for the feral mothers of feral children), How to Keep Your Relationship with Your Partner Healthy (the author is a gay! Extra emotional intelligence!), How to Read a Bedtime Story, How to Make a Handprint Plate – hello, this book tells you EVERYTHING! I can’t wait to get pregnant and use it! Also the author went and got tips from the moms of famous people like Jonathan Safren-Foer (Did she name her child ‘Jonathan’ to assure literary success?) and Rachel Maddow.

 

‘Please ignore the horrifying art on the book cover,’ Pleads author Lewis DeSimone in a note stuck into the galley of his forthcoming novel The Heart’s History. WHEN will publishers allow their authors to influence their own book covers? The authors nearly ALWAYS have better ideas than the publishers and the fearful, superstitious decisions they make. Hey, publishers of gay male fiction – STOP PUTTING PICTURES OF SHIRTLESS, BUFF MEN ON YOUR BOOK COVERS! And, don’t think you’re balancing some sort of scale of depressing aesthetics by adding a picture of the most style-less faggot in the history of faggotry (backwards baseball hat, khaki shorts, untucked button-down). That’s what they call adding INSULT to INJURY. I’ll tell you, with Sister Spit Books, our forthcoming imprint on City Lights, I’m always letting the writers pick their cover art! Anyway, back to the book: Lewis DeSimone is a great writer. His prose is thoughtful, deep, layered and real. His characters are living. It’s about love and sex and AIDs, about human connection and the ultimate unknowability of another person. It’s about the slow assimilation of a larger gay culture that used to be more angry and badass. It’s a really good book written by a very skilled author and I look forward to seeing it in the cover it deserves!

Ohmigod I love Annah Anti-Palindrome and I love the beautiful CD/zine/manifesto/button she gave me as I scooted out of our reading at Pegasus Books last week. I had to run back to San Francisco to get inseminated, so I missed her act and I am so sad about it I will book her in a RADAR very soon! Annah is a musician, a singer-songwriter I guess, and her songs are so sweet and layered with what sounds like the voices of little baby angels who assembled themselves into a harmonizing girl group. There is rudimentary beat boxing and pretty guitar and some songs sound more whimsical and some more soulful and they are all infused with a sort of girl-ish melancholy and true sincerity. And the lyrics are wonderful -love you like steel wool/like cold handlebars/like porcupines trapped in mason jars. It’s something to hear the lines I want to open my head / Dissect my brain in such a tender voice. The CD (‘Handmade because you’re worth it’) comes with a little booklet of notes about the songs, as well as a card titled ‘Resisting Palindromes’ which movingly explains Annah’s punk name: after her mom died of a morphine overdose, Annah tossed an ‘h’ into her given name of Anna, disrupting the palindrome as a way of disrupting the repetitive, violent legacies a childhood can leave you with. Change your name, change your life! You should check this person out.

Poet Michael Warr’s Adrienne Rich-blurbed (score!) new poetry collection, The Armageddon of Funk, is full of life and death: people living with the scars life gave them, people dying of religion, living on public transit. It travels from San Francisco to Chicago to Africa to Stockholm, carried on the poet’s smart, observant, opinionated shoulders. Conversations with cab drivers, setting Clarence Thomas straight about what it is to be lynched, the passing of time wrapped in culture. This is a really strong collection, with A REALLY STRONG COVER! Look at how handsome a book can be when the publisher lets the author pick the artwork! Tony Fitzpatrick’s ‘The Oil Beast’ flicks it’s creepy-magical gryphon-y tongue at you, and the poet thanks him with a dedicated poem and lots of love and the bookshelves everywhere rejoice at the arrival of a hot-looking volume. If we’re going to fight the good fight against digital readers than publishers need to step it up with covers! So, get this book, enjoy the poetry and then turn it face-out on your shelf like the piece of art it is.

 

Okay this has not even cracked into the pile of books I have to show you. I’ll be back!