Aquarelle/Rest + Noise auteur Ryan Potts - who blurbed Crucial Sprawl - has some additional kind words about the book here, on his blog.

Three Crucial Sprawl sales, as of the weekend. Thanks to everyone who picked up a copy!

Two possibly interesting items of note:


1) A Frostburg State University Center for Creative Writing Q&A with Doug Mowbray.

2) The official Crucial Sprawl press release.

CRUCIAL SPRAWL HITS THE STREETS

YES.

As we were putting the final touches on Assembling the Lord, I began to wonder about the bounds of my ambitions. Excavating old prose and hammering out new verses felt, well, inspiring: after years away, I was a poet again. And as 2008 wound down, I resolved that 2009 would be devoted to another book of poetry. It’s title would be Stay Local, and therein I’d explore themes related - loosely and directly - to sustainability and entropy in my off-kilter lyrical voice, that boom-lowering sense in recent years of all things social and economic and personal drawing back for the sake of survival. Farmer’s markets over grocery chains, local bands over national pop heroes, etc. This felt like a capital idea, and one of the first poems I wrote for this collection is actually titled “Stay Local.” Then the downturn hit, and life soured, and the focus shifted further afield to fear, to dread, to discontent - and Stay Local became Crucial Sprawl, at first after the closing line of “The New Austerity” and later after a poem titled “Crucial Sprawl.” So consider this book a catalogue of apprehensions - everything falling apart without the benefits (usually) of rhyme - but be prepared for moments of tenderness and humor and wit, paeans to loved ones, cynical chortles, splashes of gruesome color. It’s the diary of an interesting year, one in which it seemed that I was perpetually on the verge of losing everything.

Go here to read some excerpts and/or buy a copy, if you're into that kinda thing.

Get your hot Crucial Sprawl samples, here.

Dropping the first week of October.

Crucial Sprawl feedback from one of my college English professors, Dr. Richard Gillin

"The poems are energized, intense, and demanding. I tried to hear your voice in them as I read, and the combination of my memory of your voice , its cadences, power, and irony in conjunction with the written poems helps to open them and to grasp at some of the threads that run through them. Sound dominates. There is a percussive run in many, and a lash in others. On the surface I sense irony, bewilderment at times, anger, sarcasm, and ultimately hope.  The core of what you present is a sensitive evocation of now. The country is increasingly moving in radical directions politically and culturally as people search for some sense of direction. Your poems capture the painful uncertainty  that comes with significant transitions, and they develop and ironic sense of desire to hold onto old myths or at least perceptions of order. On the one hand the old stories are seen for what they are, but their loss creates a vacuum.  The sense of hope and a will to make sense out of contemporary existence inheres in the most turbulent poems. So for all the shattering of the static and distractions of the moment you create a strong voice with a latent hope for something approaching meaning. Keep writing, and maintain your critical and sharp eye for those telling details."

Wanna download an mp3 of me reading some poems from my forthcoming book? Cop it here, at the very top of the page.

It's been 30-45 days since I've had the wherewithall and focus to complete a poem.

I'm probably due, right?

I've submitted some recent unpublished work to various literary magazines, though - hopefully something strikes someone's fancy, somewhere.

And: Crucial Sprawl is coming. Promise. Soon: save your pennies!

Get ready.

EPIGRAMS FOR CRUCIAL SPRAWL

“Kim hugs Dimitri, who doesn’t seem to notice or care, and he drops his guitar by his side and stares off into the pool and eleven or twelve of us stand out by the pool and someone turns the music down so that we can hear the sounds of the city celebrating, but there’s not a whole lot to hear and I keep looking into the living room, where Muriel’s lying on a couch, smoking a cigarette, sunglasses on, watching MTV.”
Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero

“Asters are purple, there‘s purple ink/Purple‘s more popular than you think…”
Mary O’Neill, Hailstones and Halibut Bones

“Redford?/I go rob/Creamed corn, no cob/Boo-hoo, boo-hoo, go sob/Your Saab?/Oh, God”
Cam’ron, “Silky”

"...and Prairie huddled down in back, hanging on, wishing they could wake into something more benevolent and be three different people, only some family in a family car, with no problems that couldn't be solved in half an hour of wisecracks and commercials, on their way to a fun weekend at some beach."
Thomas Pynchon, Vineland

“And silence is danger, but it’s not quiet here/So why you scared?”
Pavement, “Strings of Nashville”

EPIGRAMS FOR VIGILANTE FLUXUS

“I wanted to film everything but there are things we are not getting. The wild ass is in danger in Europe--we’ve got nothing on that. We’ve got nothing on intellectual elitism funded out of public money, an important subject. We’ve got nothing on ball lightning and nothing on the National Grid and not a foot on the core-mantle problem, the problem of a looped economy, or the interesting problem of the night brain. I wanted to get it all but there’s only so much time, so much energy.”
-Donald Barthelme, “The Film”

“And the stars reflected in the lake
Are water for all their twinkling
And bloodless for all their charm.
I have blood, and a song.”
-Owen Dodson, “Sorrow is the Only Faithful One”

“One day, I’m gonna say something really impressive.”
-Asher Roth, “Muddy Swim Trunks”

mp3 of assorted CRUCIAL SPRAWL and ASSEMBLING THE LORD poems

Why? Because you'd always wanted a no-fi recording of me awkawardly reading my poetry and flubbing lines for your iPod so you can rock out to it whenever you get good and sick of the Black Eyed Peas.

On archive.org. Click here to check it out.

P.S. Thanks, Dad!

notebook scraps #2

notebook scraps #1

Because three people demanded it

For some reason, Assembling the Lord readers seem especially fond of "Courting Voids," so I figured I'd post it here.


Courting Voids

serve me up your script
{one indent] on a star-encrusted platter
and it won't begin to matter
{one Indent] how many bounces the
{Two Indents] trades have counted

before your brightest hope crash-lands in
{one Indent] tinsel turnaround

and touch where

{one Indent] I'm gone.

camera wounds heal backwords
{one Indent] draw maps in blood
{Two Indents] forethought sharks.

unlicensed lips split, spill
open, even though I know that
{one Indent] your eyes are dust-rimmed portals
{Two Indents] into silent beige static

and I just killed you on paper
{one Indent] for the seventeenth time.

John Ashbury is the shit.

New Poem: "The Book of Common Prayer"

Tumblers ungrasped,
Erupting to egress.

Every rook a refugee
cant, can’t. U-boats
bisect idyllic quays.

We’ll ladle you fables,
Knives held fast to napes.

In a weird limbo now, given that Crucial Sprawl is done and awaiting publishing and I'm already working on the NEXT book, tentatively titled Koreas.