That’s exactly why I come to poems. I want an invitation and a command inflicted upon me. Boss me around to a better place, I say.
Have you ever been infected by a word? I have a memory of a German poet—and I haven’t been able to find this poem—but my memory of the translation is that it included the word “sistercreature.”
Anyway. Go forth and hold still to be astonished slowly by paying attention.
How much of our own life do we try to forget, force away? Wendy C. Ortiz lives in those moments. You can see it in her book Excavation, which details her high school teacher’s grooming of her, as it escalates into a full blown relationship; to Hollywood Notebook, a daily record of her twenty-something self […]
You have to let in the world. I have to let in the world in order to get a book to the point that it’s even ready, because I really rely on my readers to help shape it.
I’d love to think that Lonesome Ballroom…might prove one of many “weird” books that make our broader tradition stranger and therefore stronger, more strapping.
The aesthetic that attracts me is trash and discarded stuff. That’s the rat seduction.
I am flirty and irreverent. Deadpan and oblique.
Canadian author, Derek McCormack, writes like Vincent Price possessed by Elsa Schiaparelli: minimal, obscene, cartoonish. His early works include Dark Rides (1996), The Haunted Hillbilly (2003) and The Show That Smells (2008). In 2011, McCormack was diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Since then, he has published The Well-Dressed Wound (2015) and Castle Faggot (2020), both with […]
That feeling of disorientation might be my favorite thing about poetry. I think poems can bring about new possibilities by skirting the edges of sense, or they can expand our capacity for sense-making.