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.

In Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Patrick Levy shows us what we want: connection, sex, power over others.

“O Scarlett I don’t know what mountains these are,” but I know longing when I see it.

Longing for connection “when I swim into your white dress.”

Longing for pain in footsteps “still pressed across my chest,” longing for release in lipstick that can explode a face.

“And sometimes Scarlett I am afraid to touch you with these hands I’ve broken over steering wheels.”

There is brokenness here.

A sweaty shaking heart.

A radio moaning.

A man cut “into equal mounds of dough.”

And there is sex. Heels braced against bedposts, tongues like kite strings. Berry-flavored hips. “A strong ocean of paint spilling out from the fold of your neck when I kiss you.”

In Please Don’t Leave Me Scarlett Johansson, Thomas Patrick Levy shows us what we want: connection, sex, power over others.

He shows us what we fear: loneliness, unfulfilled longing, that we don’t even have power over ourselves.

He shows us who we are.

Read this book.

Find out.

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.

The Darkness of a Whole Generation Living Without Consolation: A Review of Melissa Broder's When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother

There’s a beautiful tension in Melissa Broder’s poetry — the darkness of a whole generation living without consolation, the humour that refuses to take the first element seriously, the microcosm of personality types living outside their time, and the macro view of an America obsessed with staying now. Sweet wisdom grinds against nasty portraits of adolescent insecurity, old hippies and junkies totter on in a world where brand names are the new great signifiers, all held together by a great satirical bent that can’t help but put its own concerns in the absurd tableau with the rest.

Broder’s eye for the absurd, the ability to find the goofiness in any situation (or, failing that, to make it goofy with just the right word), compelled me to publish her debut collection, When You Say One Thing But Mean Your Mother. Even the most deeply personal confessions in her poetry are tempered by an inveterate playfulness, a voice that plays with language (good), but also plays with the modern poet’s role of great complainer (even better). Her narrators come across as richly imagined characters, each with a different version of a smirk directed toward her subject, but with a special sensitivity as well.

Some of the finest moments in this collection, however, come when Broder turns her satirical eye to herself, and to the world of poetry itself. For instance, the first few lines of the poem, “Dear Billy Collins,” where Broder pulls off an impeccable impression of the man himself:

“If I don’t stop using

the word fingerbang

I’ll never get to be

poet laureate.”

Mule Is Headphone Poetry

Shane McCrae and I trade YouTube clips of bands we like over e-mail. There's a tonal quality in the types of clips we send -- the bands we like tend to have lyric sensibilities while their words and their guitar sounds are distorted through a tangle of reverb and fuzz. I know Shane's favorite band is My Bloody Valentine. I know he likes the Jesus & Mary Chain. He likes bands with guitars that sound like purring chainsaws. Of course, I like these types of bands too. There's something about the union of the lyric with the cacophonous that puts me in a meditative state. Drone music. Layered music . . . music that I can feel in my jaw. Ultimately, it's music that breaks my heart. The hum of it rising from my stomach into my blood so that the bass syncopates with my pulse. Distortion is part of the message. That no matter how hard a musician strives for that perfect note, for virtuosity, there's beauty and grace in his or her failure to reach the achievement.

This is all to say that Shane McCrae's first book of poetry, Mule, breaks my heart in the same delicious way that I enjoy having my heart broken again and again while listening to my favorite LP's on a slow Sunday morning. Such art asks for active cooperation between reader and artist in order to achieve transference. The reader must be willing to surrender, since a total understanding of the speaker's grief in Mule occurs beyond the bounds of reason or logic. At the heart of Shane's work is a heavy layering of formal poetic impulses -- much of the book is written in meter and rhyme -- with the distortion of the meter through caesura, elision, and slanted lines that signify a break in the metrical count. There is no punctuation throughout the book unless you're counting the forward slashes as punctuation. Shane also makes use of heavy repetition. I'm telling you this now because I want you to understand something -- the tension taking place in Mule between the poems' collapsing sonnet-like forms and the highly emotional material (the end of love, fatherhood, race, and loss) will slay you as it did me.

The poem, "Internal Horses" is one poem that tore me up. The poem follows the speaker whose marriage is dissolving while he observes his autistic son:

As we divorced        Nicholas rode

internal horses          / And watching him

from the bench at the edge of the park/ In wildflowers

him in wildflowers in fields/ Of wildflowers him in fields        on

playgrounds which

Blossom from the ground

and then the ground

Must be covered over         with foam with bark

The stammering syntax suggests a speaker who is feeling for some solid, verifiable ground and in failing to find it, resorts to a stutter. I like to think of the loop machine employed by Merrill Garbus, the lead singer and performer of the tUnE-yArDs. She deftly records multiple tracks of her voice and then intersperses them in the song with a touch of a foot pedal. The effect is astounding. The impact of the vocal repetition is primal. So too the impact of the repetition of "wildflowers" in this poem.  The portrayal of the speaker's sense of the child rocking and horses running is a pitch-perfect dissolution of form.  It gives me the impression of a climber searching the crevasse of a sheer rock-face for a foothold.

Speaking of which, the iambic meter surges the scene forward while the speaker seems to attempt to hold the action back by breaking the metrical count. The forward slashes signify the end of a metrical line. The image of "internal horses" suggests that the autistic child is rocking to sooth himself while the speaker imagines an idyllic place for the child's attentions. The poem continues:

To love him just enough     to sit there watch-/ ing not enough         for

us to stay together

Not more enough than us

The above lines refer to one of the central themes of the book -- how to stay "married" despite everything in the world . . . how everything is "Not more enough than us." The idea of marriage, throughout the book, is mutable. Though marriage refers to the speaker's ending marriage, it also suggests the fusion of other disparate selves. In this case, the child is not enough to keep this marriage from collapsing. But in other cases in the book marriage refers to race, fatherhood, and a myriad of other selves that cannot keep the speaker's world from bursting apart.

Finally, the poem closes:

If we had put our ears to the ground

we might have heard the horses/ Carrying him our son away

the sound      carried away and al-/so back        both    both together

Not running from and not             running to us

Imagine this last stanza to be the closing quatrain of a sonnet. The speaker speculates what might have been had both speaker and his soon-to-be ex-spouse listened to what the son might be hearing. But of course, we know that such an exercise is a futile one. The poem is a momentary stay against confusion and ultimately fails to keep the speaker's world together.

Now, I understand that one of the pitfalls of writing challenging work is the potential for readers to feel required and not invited to participate. It's the old issue of accessibility and whether or not the poet is being generous. Let me say that the work in Mule is generous beyond measure and that Shane McCrae's poems are more than inviting. It's so easy to provide the reader an answer, a simple hook, a stable core, but the materials that Shane McCrae handles in Mule can't be touched with kid gloves. There's nothing easy about heartbreak.

I had this discussion with a couple of friends about Radiohead's new album The King of Limbs. It's a difficult album, but if you're attentive. If you listen closely, it will break your heart with every listen. The album's use of layering as well as distortion, plus the barely audible sounds in the background add tremendous resonance to the entirety of the album. I like to call this type of music "headphone music." It's not an indictment of the album, but rather high praise. It means it requires immersion, an attentive listen. It means it's the reader's moral obligation to give over an afternoon or morning to the celebration of the work. Mule is headphone poetry. It's the type of music I expect Shane to link in his e-mail. It's the kind of poetry I'll play on a loop.

The Poetics of Our Suffering

A couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of hearing Dorothea Lasky read from Black Life, her most recent collection from Wave Books and a collection I'm absolutely in love with. She introduced a poem to a crowded auditorium of writers by saying "This poem is titled 'It's a lonely world,' but it feels a lot less lonely being here with you guys tonight." It was true -- even though she had just read a heartbreaking poem about losing her father, there was a sense that everyone in the room had come together to support her. It was just one of those nights.

I've frequently heard writers and readers say that the best poems always end up being sad poems. It's weird, isn't it -- the human tendency to let another's misery be a therapeutic vehicle? I'm not one to make lofty statements about such a broad demographic, but I can say that I personally enjoy sad poems because of how I react to them: something about their gut-wrenching nature always leaves me with a strong urge to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better person. Maybe I'm being a little too romantic here, but I believe that in this shared sense of sadness, we're empowered to be more compassionate and understanding individuals.

I mention all this because whether she's writing about the mathematicians she's loved or the living rooms she's imagined, you always get the sense that Dottie is the type of person that understands suffering. The thing that's most important about Black Life, I think, is that Dottie can get down in the mucky, muddy underbelly of human existence and sculpt it in a brutally honest way that reminds us of our own disappointments and shortcomings. There is, of course, solidarity in sadness.

Not to over-share or anything, but the last couple of months have been pretty hard on me. The thing, though, is that Dottie's poems always seemed to remind me that I wasn't alone in my misery. In this one poem I really like ("How to Survive in this World"), Dottie reminds us that "There is a lot to be sad about/but no point in feeling that sadness."  I've grown very attached to this line over the last couple of months: in the moments where I've felt defeated and powerless, I've thought about what little could be accomplished in my wallowing. I've taken that negative energy and applied it to more important things; I've kept my head up, and I've moved on.

And maybe that's why I find myself so frequently in Awe of Dottie's poetry: maybe the poetics of our suffering are the only things that bind us together; maybe if we can see through life's repulsive moments, we can be better to one another and (more importantly) be better to ourselves.

I promise you that there's a lot more worth talking about in Black Life. I plan on getting there and I certainly plan on being less dramatic, but I want you to know how important this collection is to me. From the little I know about Dottie's ideals and aesthetics, I think she'd be happy to hear that Black Life reminded me of how sad and ugly this world can sometimes be; she'd probably be happier to know that  while I was reading Black Life, I felt a strong urge to never let that sadness and ugliness defeat me. And that's why I think it's such an important and awesome book: even in her moments of absolute weakness and disparity, Dottie found a way to remind me that there still is a lot of beauty out there -- I  just had to sort through all the awful stuff first.

Mark Leidner Is the Boss of Me

Mark Leidner does a boss non sequitur. He is the boss of boss non sequiturs. I am pretty sure adding an S to a Latin word doesn't actually make it plural? If you need boss proof, please go away and read "The Awesomest Bagel," which I read in the shower of an old apartment and read every day for two years, except for the days when I didn't shower. Then come back and keep reading this page here. Oops, you're already gone. That's okay, I am pretty sure plenty of the other people can't read instructions like you can.

Real talk: I have been in love with Mark Leidner since I was 16 years old and had a LiveJournal and discovered his LiveJournal and had vigorous marriage-based fantasies about him. That is seven years of love and counting. He was a member of a poetry community where, to get in, you had to submit three poems and the members would critique them and  vote on whether you should be allowed to join. Mark Leidner voted "yes" on my application and that is still the best part of my life so far.

So the aphorisms in The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover kind of feel like Mark hair I've been collecting from a Mark brush, and I do mean that in the best way possible. They are precious and mysterious, which probably a lot of things in Harry Potter are too? If you liked Harry Potter, you’ll love The Angel in the Dream of Our Hangover, I am pretty sure.

Check out just one of these bad boys: “aphorism pithily opens a window between the known and the not; nevermind it is winter.” Does it immediately remind me of Game of Thrones and how they really need to get rid of that excruciatingly boring Night’s Watch storyline because I can no longer stand to watch Jon Snow and his dumb boring sad face? Yes. Is it also really freaking “beautiful, like putting on a gold suit and going to sleep in it”? Yes. Do I watch too much TV? Absolutely. There's  no hope left for me, but if you are interested in delaying the decay of your own brain, I hear that books are good for that. This one is even small and easy to read, which is a plus if your brain is half decayed, or three quarters.