My Second Collection Tis Done ... but I will still obsess about it

I keep reordering the poems searching tirelessly for the "heart" of the narrative. The story of this Anhedonia and myself ... and John Berryman ... and Robert Lowell ... even the children's author, Dare Wright ... and the Women of Ward 81 (gorgeously immortalized in a book by Mary Ellen Mark and Karen Folger Jacobs). These are the characters in this story I hope has great luck in finding a home with a small press. I mentioned contests and those are good (always check any contest out on www.foetry.com before entering. This site lists the Presses / Contests / Judges who have been unethical), but I am also going to shop it around the old-fashioned way in a large envelope to small, independent presses, as well as University Presses.

And some good Small Murders news is that my Milwaukee trip is fast approaching. I am so excited about staying in an old (hopefully haunted) hotel downtown and of course about the Marquette University's Women & Creativity Conference. I am presenting my paper, "Shock, Awe, and Everything in Between: The Dolls of Hans Bellmer" and giving a reading from Small Murders at the conference. It is also looking good that I will also maybe be reading at an indie bookshop in Milwaukee called Broad Vocabulary. When the date is set for this, I will post it just in case I have any Milwaukee-area readers reading this.

Last night, a great breeze came into my living room window. The small postcard photo I have of who I think of as Anhedonia fell to the floor after dancing about in the wind of the room. It was quite telling, endearing. I was talking last night to someone about poetry and ideas and I am simply convinced that poetry and most art comes out of the mundane, the simple, the things you would never notice if you were not noticing. Big things like love, death, hate, rage do not inspire art -- if anything, they are merely symptoms. Aaron, I would be very very curious about your take on this issue ... pray tell. But I digress ... there was every reason why I wouldn't have noticed a breeze capturing a piece of paper ... but I did. It was beautiful. I took a great photo of its fall and landing and as soon as I find the USB cord for my camera, I will post it. It was beautiful ... it was nothing really ... simple ... it was The Luck of Anhedonia.