I haven’t had any time to update recently, but I’ve got a few topics loaded in the chamber and ready to shoot — just need time to write them up, and time doesn’t come cheap this time of year. I’ll have an official count on Rattle Poetry Prize submissions by the end of the week, but we’ve already broken last year’s record (“even in this economy”) and still have a two-foot stack of hardcopy submissions to log. In the middle of this, we’ve decided to move to a new apartment, sacrificing some space and solitude for the ammenities of modern life. Who would have guessed their contest entries would spend time in a U-Haul?
I did have time to notice a bump in my Amazon sales ranking — shot up to #50,000 for the first time in a few months — so made a note try to figure out where that came from. And I think I just did… Googling around, I found this new review of American Fractal by Michael Turner on Growler. Thanks, Michael, your publicity paid for my coffee this morning (if I ever sell enough to trigger royalties)!
Growler is new to me, but two years old — a smartly designed and well-written compliment to the equally choice Barrelhouse magazine. One of my to-do posts is a list of other lit mags fans of Rattle might like, and Barrelhouse was already on the list. Anyway, Growler reviews first books of poetry, so if you’re looking for new poets, it’s a great place to start.
Michael Turner’s review is my favorite to come out yet. When I put the manuscript together, I worried that it would come across as a hodgepodge of poems, rather than a collected unit — that I hadn’t left enough clues to resolve the broader picture of the “American fractal,” as it were. Turner gets it, and I have no idea who he is, so I’m pretty sure I never explained it to him. In fact, he sometimes articulates the theme better than I can. Here’s the conclusion, read the whole review for the rest, obviously:
Many of Green’s speakers seem to desire to disappear, to re-work the equation for subtraction. It is the frustration caused by a world that fails to allow disappearance which provides this book with a convincing uncertainty. Green’s is a world where one cannot distinguish between the ending and the beginning simply by the sound of the applause.
Very cool.
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p.s. The Odd Life of Timothy Green. Gotta try to say that phrase every once in a while, as part of a Google-Bomb Defense Shield. Haven’t seen any updates about that deadly movie, but it’s already creeping up the search rankings, and it’s still in rumor-phase.