Happy Mother's Day! May all mothers live in communities that value & care for their bodies, minds, & freedom to choose otherwise.
Want some Boys Behind Glass for a care giver in your life? link in linktree...with funds from every purchase from me to organizations that support survivors.
The first glimpse of BOYS BEHIND GLASS hot off the presses & just in time for Sunday Night Poetry, Prose & Cocktails @ Hungry Brain in Chicago!! Heaping thanks to TRP for getting it here in time--& good golly it's gorgeous! (Hope the artist, Jenny Walton, digs it too!) Dont you want to take BOYS BEHIND GLASS home with you?
Chicago friends! I'm GEEKED to launch my cheeky, irreverent BOYS BEHIND GLASS at a Valentine's weekend reading near you!
It's my first reading in Chicago & I'm so thankful to Simone Muench & Kenyatta Rogers, poet humans I much admire & thrilled (nervous!) to read alongside rock stars, David Baker & Julie Iromuana. Won't you come out to the Sunday Reading Series: Poetry, Prose & Cocktails this month!? I'd love to see your shining face & give you a squeeze!
I'm diving into the forays of essay via a quirky art geek substack...O is for Octopus! (link in linktree)....been dreaming various iterations of this for years! You can subscribe (free!) to get these wonders & curiosities delivered to yr inbox...or read via substack app or website...I hope you dig it!
Yay TC! estimates @ 7000+! great energy, signs, pride! (my own signs could have been executed better but it's showing up that counts, right? plus sign guru Mike Albaugh made fab extras) No KINGS!! Oh except MLK...& Carole King, BB King, Billie Jean King, Don King, Rodney King, Nat King Cole, Elvis, Larry, Regina, Imagene, Ben, Coretta Scott...
So deeply grateful to Aaron Coleman for this generous blurb that brought me to tears...
"Here’s the dirt the heart wants the pain it knows” writes Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, in a poem paired with Jenny Walton’s painting of a dating profile photo: a man on his knees, his face hidden while sponge-scrubbing the floor. There are so many intricate, reflective layers to wonder and worry about in Boys Behind Glass. Steinorth and Walton craft a brilliant book form that invites us to consider carefully the thrall and trepidation of potential love, lust, loss, lies—when we try to see masculinities, what do we really see and how might we feel if we’re caught watching? In these poems, the veil between humorous and serious is as slight as a camera’s lens. Impressive range and incisive specificity mark this book’s bespoke ekphrastic conversation and wily relationship to notation. The personal and political stakes stay high in this “survey of suitors” that questions and footnotes: what is the body, what is the suit, how and why do we wear what we wear, and what are each of us suited to put on—or take off? We do doubletakes at Dante, Darwin, the original Walkman™, and Superman as we consider the violence and mess of masculinities. I’m haunted and enhanced by the many rabbit holes this book looks down. Yes, there are multitudes, but what about that knotty tension between pairs and doubles? “Forget/what you think you know about double exposure,” but be careful: “every pairing is a beginning…”
bbg drops this fall!...pre-order now via linktree!
Friends, have you devoured Jenny Molberg's The Court of No Record yet? A powerhouse commute-in form & syntax- Receipts for revising trauma's sentence- So. Stinking. Smart. Check it out!
Super geeked to share this forthcoming monster dropping THIS FALL! Now available for pre-order!
What is it? Here's rockstar Jenny Molberg's take, "Boys Behind Glass opens a door hidden behind a mirror--and I fell straight through. Part lookbook, part feminist archive, this weird, wise, dazzling, and genre-defying collaboration flips the historically male gaze inside out. In conversation with Jenny Walton's haunting watercolor portrait series, "Match/Enemy," Jennifer Sperry Steinorth sifts through fragmented narratives to uncover the complexities of testimony, embodied trauma, justice, and complicity. Where silence and spectacle have long sheilded power, this book holds its provocative glare. Ok, Archaic Torso of Apollo--I see you."
2 weeks in AR shadow hunting the belated, beloved CD with her loves & lovers. with deepest gratitude to the people who flew to meet me, people who opened their homes & farms & memories, the land, the creeks, the record keepers, our blinking peepers....
photo credit for the Calabash group portrait circa 1973? 5? to the marvelous Andrew Kilmore.
photo credits to Forrest Gander for me @ Flippin Jail
& to Kate Murr for me & Kate Murr on a bus at spellbinding Turnbuckle Farm
to be continued...
