We Think It Is One Thing but It Changes to Another

As I carried this book around with me, reading, I heard from multiple passersby, “Gross, is that someone throwing up?” to which I replied, “No, I think it is just a kid bobbing for apples.” Their responses then were usually calm, mostly understanding, with maybe even a restatement like we are all guilty of: “Oh. I thought it was someone puking.”

This to me is reading Jason Bredle’s Smiles of the Unstoppable — we think it is one thing but it changes to another, and then another, until we start to see that evolution is the thing that Bredle is chasing down with his use of words.

from “The Song Banana”:

“Sometimes I love the song banana and sometimes the song banana
makes me completely crazy
is what I wrote on a postcard, placed in my pocket
and walked to Happy Foods
wondering what might happen
on one of those days
I’d been feeling especially lost.”

Bredle uses both line breaks as well as word choice to negate what comes before, to change objects from one line to the next, to stay ahead of the reader by steps and steps. Smiles of the Unstoppable is a mountain of these, all well-crafted and burbling, so while this effect could be awful in the wrong hands, it is fantastically resonant here. Bredle, in his third collection of poems, has an understanding of how this evolution affects us as we read — knowledge that this practice of ever-changing keeps us forward, makes us want, keeps us stooping curiously close the page.

from “Kitchen Stadium at Twilight”:

“Man, that dude looks exactly like Scott.
I mean, freakishly tall yet also short with crazy non-crazy hair
falling all over his shoulders which aren’t shoulders
but instead comets.”

Add a soft mixture of culture and lit prowess and urban-dictionary slang to this always negating, always changing, always evolving style of poetry, and Bredle has me officially on his side. I am won over by his palette, by the color of his shapes, by the accumulation of his techniques and the words within them. And I’m not even sure if it was a battle, though there is some delicious fight in Smiles of the Unstoppable, a bite and phrases to chew.

from “Poem”:

“So far we’ve been focusing on here and now,
yet not focused on here and now but there and yesterday—
a red kitchen, ceramic roosters,
gravel driveway,
basketball hoop and fence separating us from the woods.
I remember these things fondly,
but how will I remember here and now
when they become there and yesterday?”

I feel like Jason Bredle is fucking with us, just a little bit, and I kind of like it.

Michael Stewart Has Nothing to Apologize For

Michael Stewart’s The Hieroglyphics is a book we had to publish, & here’s why: We are our roots, and books that take those roots, both linguistic and visual, and churn them / crank them / rev them up into something modern and lyrical and rife, that is what drives Mud Luscious Press forward.

Michael Stewart came to us with The Hieroglyphics in its completed manuscript form, headed by the following description (read disclaimer):

"Horapollo Niliacus, who most likely never existed, wrote the original Hieroglyphica. It was a collection of some 189 interpretations of the Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were entirely, & unintentionally, fallacious. The collection was divided into two books, the first -- the one I am using in the excellent Boas translation -- dealt with seventy hieroglyphics & the second book with the remaining 119.

Using Horapollo’s original chapter titles & order, as well as incorporating many of his sentences with my own, I have attempted to engage in a kind of conversation. To this end, I have also incorporated lines from the Book of Jubilees, the Book of Enoch & the Old Testament among others.

I apologize to Boas, Horapollo, & the unknown writers of those other books for what I have done to their work."

I immediately dug in and was astounded by what he had carved out of and from these baseline texts. Michael Stewart has done in The Hieroglyphics not mere translation or redefining but the building of a new world from a previous one without losing or burying or wrecking the story.

Michael Stewart has nothing to apologize for: These hieroglyphics that he read and then rendered into words mount until they topple over and through us. Mud Luscious Press will forever be grateful to have had a small hand in the largeness of our collective history.

What is most fun to me about Svalina’s work is watching reviewers try to nail this book down to a genre or a category or a placement.

Mathias Svalina’s I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur is a book we had to publish, & here’s why: Mud Luscious Press seeks to exist in the space between fiction and poetry, and there is perhaps no greater recent example of this than Svalina’s poetic fictions about failed businesses.

I knew from Svalina’s previous books Creation Myths and Destruction Myth that his vibe was our vibe, but when I read his Cupboard Pamphlet Series mini-book Play, I had to get in touch with him directly to see what else was in his writerly pipeline. And what was in there, sitting amongst his other brilliant words? I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur.

The reviews have been very favorable and sales have topped 500 copies in just two months, but what is most fun to me about Svalina’s work is watching reviewers try to nail this book down to a genre or a category or a placement. They aren’t sure whether it is a novella or a collection or a series of linked poems or something else entirely, but that is exactly the feat of Mathias Svalina: He exists as we want to exist, between the between.

If Mud Luscious Press is building a niche inside of a niche, our feet our squarely planted in a writer like Mathias Svalina and a book like I Am A Very Productive Entrepreneur. He is one more very important building block in the work that Mud Luscious Press wants to be known for decades from now.