This is Why I Hurt You voted Best Book or Chapbook of 2008

Black Ocean Press asked small press editors to select the best books of 2008, and Kate Greenstreet's This is Why I Hurt You came in on top. You can see the other results here, and you can order the chapbook (very few copies remaining) here. Congrats Kate!

My life of late has been something like this:

1.)  Teaching: originally three classes, now four.

2.)  Taking over someone's class after a week into the semester--I have the syllabus, the required reading materials, a stack of papers to grade, and nothing else.  I have to create an exam from scratch (based on a book I haven't read yet).  Figuring things out, thus far, has not been smooth sailing.

3.)  Co-directing a play, auditions began last night.

4.)  Working on a review and then missing the deadline because of #2.

5.)  Making chapbooks (recent orders went in the mail this week).

6.)  Editing and proofing my book.

7.)  Updating my CV, writing a teaching statement, etc., for a February deadline.

8.)  Feeling stressed.

9.)  Not getting to the gym.

Early blurbs for A Model Year

As some of you may know, my book A Model Year will be published this spring/summer by Coconut Books.  I recently received two blurbs:

"Gina Myers's A Model Year contains more grace, precision, and wisdom than I've encountered in one place for some time.  Myers writes with a melancholic confidence that is all her own, but which also pays homage to an exquisite assortment of ghosts, poetic and otherwise.  "We each have our own word for loneliness," she writes, and her poems relentlessly chart the contours of emptiness, stasis, silence, and longing.  Their sadness is everywhere laced, however, with inspiring, life-sustaining forms of honesty and generosity.  "I'd like to give all the quiet things to you," Myers writers--and here, in pitch-perfect language, in poem after poem, she does."

--Maggie Nelson

"Reading Gina Myers is like the pleasure of listening to the most quiet notes in Morty Feldman's music.  It's a green music where everything is convincing, simply refined and secretly fiery.  The poetry seems to have taken a polygraph test and has the truthfulness of an injured voice.  Photographs of loving are here and also the global shifts between her Michigan and her New York.  It's humble and observant as the figurative art of Schuyler, but there is always a funny pointillism that points to nothing except love without hope.  A whole year in single sighs, the scale of being life-size: a world of yes and no, a long poem in arpeggios, and full disclosure as a fear and poetics."

--David Shapiro

Wishlist

Frank Sherlock's Over Here was released today from Factory School's Heretical Texts series. For fifteen bucks you can order it through SPD. I was happy to catch Frank's reading in the marathon this New Year Day. He is always a delight to hear and a delight to talk to. I haven't read Over Here yet, but I feel confident in highly recommending it.

The Courage of Detroit

There is an interesting article by Mitch Albom in this week's Sports Illustrated.  Love him or hate him, Albom speaks to what it means to be a Michigander, to know hope, failure, and misery, and yet to survive.  You can read the article here.

Review of Katy Lederer's The Heaven-Sent Leaf

My review of Katy Lederer's The Heaven-Sent Leaf is now up in the January issue of BookSlut. You can read it here.