I am so excited to be able to make this announcement! I have been letting my writing stew for quite long enough--I haven't had a proper chapbook since March (not counting the limited edition zine I made for my Got Poetry Live feature this summer)--and all that simmering and boiling over and simmering again and freezing and thawing and reheating and serving etc. etc. has finally paid off. With a large chunk of the free time afforded me by the holiday weekend, I pulled together Spindle, a collection of poems that revolves around my thinking about women writers. I've been doing a lot of reading and writing on the construct of the woman writer over the past few months, alongside a lot of recreational reading of women writers. Top that off with a sprinkling of bell hooks' writing on the theory of love in American culture, and you get the raw materials for all the writing you'll find in Spindle.
Many of the poems are imagined biographies, either in third person or first (these mark my first foray into the terrifying, delicate, difficult realm of persona writing, which has me both baffled and delighted), of the women writers held up as examples of women writers through history: Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Mary Oliver snuck into the party as well. Ted Hughes also makes an appearance as a hapless baker, if you can imagine such a thing. I tried to.
The copy I currently have in my hands is just a proof spat out by my dad's office printer, so they aren't for sale just yet, but I hope to have some real copies printed up by the middle of this coming week. I am probably more proud of this book than anything I've accomplished recently; it represents so much of what I've thought about/been plagued by in my study of writing and literature; it is the exorcism of a frustration I didn't know how to articulate until very recently. I hope to have it in as many hands as I can manage, as soon as possible.
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