Days of Shame & Failure by Jennifer L. Knox in the New York Times Book Review!

The December 27 issue of the New York Times Book Review was their first-ever poetry issue. We are super proud that Jennifer's book was reviewed by Kathleen Rooney, and couldn't agree more with the enthusiastic praise:

Jennifer L. Knox’s poems hit, with deceptive ease, all the poetic marks a reader could want: intellectual curiosity, emotional impact, beautiful language, surprising revelation and arresting imagery. They’re also genre-bending, dizzying in their versatility. [...] Dynamic and shape-shifting as Days of Shame & Failure is, Knox holds it all together with her acerbic, down-to-earth voice and dark, perverse and appealing comic-apocalyptic worldview.

We're thrilled to be busily filling orders for new readers!

Read the full review.

Get a copy direct from Bloof Books:

DAYS OF SHAME & FAILURE by Jennifer L. Knox from Bloof Books

Prefer PayPal? Here ya go.

Or visit one of our independent bookstore partners: Farley's Bookshop, Powell's Books, Inc., Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Malvern Books, or other fine booksellers.

MORE REVIEWS

"The bizarre continues to reign supreme in this fabulous fourth collection from Knox. [...] Knox boldly confronts her own insignificance, the subtle disintegration of the physical body, and a sense of uncanny mistrust about self-identity—the 'mirror as mirage.' The result is a book that's endlessly entertaining and emotionally stimulating." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Jennifer L. Knox’s fourth book of poems, Days of Shame & Failure, made me stand up, spit my tea, and then die of jealousy like a teenager fuming around her bedroom, ripping up Tigerbeat pin-ups of Jennifer L. Knox." —Laura Minor, The Southeast Review

" ["The Killer" is] a daring poem, one that risks an uncool beauty to deliver a spiritual reality that acknowledges the calculated, obsessive brutality of predator-prey action. Yet somehow this takes place without dishonoring either dog or rabbit, or human observer. As Stella licks the rabbit a plausible mammalian love seems to be manifest, but it’s an awful, unsentimental love. The poem’s not hunt porn, but it isn’t squeamish either. It’s—is this a bad word?—honest. " —Jay Besemer, Entropy Magazine

"Knox, with her characteristic use of dark humor, holds a mirror up to us as readers. Some of these poems are gut-bustingly funny, some are sniffle-worthy, but most are even better: a combination of both." —Nathan Logan, Weird Sister by Nathan Logan

If you're new to Knox's work, you'll be glad to know Bloof also publishes her three previous books—A Gringo Like Me, Drunk by Noon, and The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway. And all are available in our store! (Choose a bundle deal for a box of Knox.)

Closed through December 28

Bloof Books & Quotidian Bee are taking next week off. 

We may post to social media during the break, if anything particularly urgent or exciting arises. But it will be pretty quiet around here. 

Regular posting (and order filling) will resume Tuesday, 12/29. The Quotidian Bee will resume posting January 4.

If you missed our December newsletter (sign up, upper right corner of this blog!), you can read it here. It features our two newest releases, some news from our authors, and a few "recent and recommended" titles by some of our small press friends. 

SWAN FEAST (2nd edition) by Natalie Eilbert

SWAN FEAST online

SWAN FEAST
Natalie Eilbert

ISBN: 9780982658796
6 x 9 | 102 pages | $16
2nd Edition (redesigned & updated)

Purchase via Square above.
Prefer PayPal?

A second edition of Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert is forthcoming from Bloof Books in December 2015.

"Natalie Eilbert's powerful first book is a twenty-first century hymn to the Venus of Wilendorf, a 30,000-year-old figurine whose ample body is a protest against all that seeks to diminish us. Like Plath of "Lady Lazarus," Eilbert speaks with unbridled but precise rage; in lines of propulsive music she takes female self-loathing head on and reveals it for what it is, pervasive, invasive, and invented, like a city that threatens to divest us of our human/animal body. Deeply resistant, these poems get the body back, feeding it, adoring it, finally marrying it, with flamboyance, flare and love. This is the voice of contemporary feminism, brazen, smart, unafraid, and desirous of nothing less than life." —JULIE CARR

"Natalie Eilbert uses an immense attention-in sentences filigreed and permissive-to show how the sexuality of the real and imagined Venus de Willendorf lives in our pulses, is our pulse, our Texas, our asses on the hood of a car in a trailer park. Every scrap that's flashed into this poet's mind transmutes into an icon for the flesh and the chaotic negotiation of one's desires. Few people can represent such vital, teeming complexity with such bridled rage. Plath stands in the recent past of this voice; Venus de Willendorf becomes a force within it you cannot imagine. Eilbert, standing so near to us, flinches at nothing." —CYNTHIA ARRIEU-KING

"'There is no document of civilization that isn't also its ruins.' Swan Feast is the banquet of a fallen goddess, told through the trance of an autobiographical duckling girl. The transforming voice is visionary. She connects the discovery of the Venus of Willendorf to the discovery of oil in the Middle East, implicating imperial industrialism to the passing away of Venus into faded memory and historical anorexia. Empire is the tomb of the goddess. To excavate is a 'hilarious privilege,' and its anachronism borrows illumination from darkness. The duckling is resurrecting ancient powers whose excavation ride on rage, grief, a woman's paradoxically empowered desperation which finds solidity in disappearance. In the wake of suffering, we may remember ourselves. Out of ruin, an alien star rises." —FENG SUN CHEN

"Time, and the world, want the body, and are coming for it. Natalie Eilbert tears the body down, and makes time and the world go looking for something else to want. Politically charged, performing a gnosticism of our human physiology, and impressionistic like a train, Swan Feast is both a book of poems and a pre-emptive strike." —JOSH BELL

Natalie Eilbert is the author of two chapbooks, Conversation with the Stone Wife (Bloof Books, 2014) and And I Shall Again Be Virtuous (Big Lucks Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Tin House, the Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets, Guernica, and many other journals. She is the founding editor of the Atlas Review. Swan Feast is her first poetry collection.

The Quotidian Bee

In mid-November, Bloof Books officially launched our new weekdaily poetry zine, the Quotidian Bee, featuring selections from small press books, chapbooks & magazines that have not yet appeared online. Submissions will open in January. One poem at a time, with links to the publishers for more information & ordering. Please come & browse.

ARCHIVES 

MON 11/30
"King" by Sandra Beasley

FRI 11/27
 "Black Friday" by Sandra Simonds

THU 11/26
 --no poem today--

WED 11/25/15
"Dear November," by Joanna Fuhrman

TUE 11/24/15
"from The Cities" by Megan Kaminsky

MON 11/23/15
"To Write a Poem" by Barbara Jane Reyes

FRI 11/20/15    
"Untitled" by Marisa Crawford

THU 11/19/15      
"Layla" by Lauren Clark

WED 11/18/15      
"That Outfit Is Smart Because It References Pamela Des Barres" by Gina Abelkop

TUE 11/17/15  
"Dear Other:" by Megan Burns

MON 11/16/15
"Self-Portrait as Shop Window" by Patricia Spears Jones


The Quotidian Bee

Bloof Books Chapbook Series: The list so far

Did you know we release our chapbooks as free ebooks/PDFs after the handmade print editions sell out? Here's what's available in the series so far. Enjoy!

Free Digital Chapbooks

• 
• Conversation with the Stone Wife by Natalie Eilbert
• 
• The Failure Age by Amanda Montei
• 
• Little Uglies by Dawn Sueoka
• 
• Nonstop Pop by Becca Klaver
     
• Odalisque by Ben Fama
• 
• Packing by Hailey Higdon
• 
• Poems Are the Only Real Bodies by Jennifer Tamayo
• 
• This Is What It Is Like to Be Loved by Me by Jared White
• 
• Windowboxing by Kirsten Kaschock

 Coming Soon in Free Digital Formats (print versions have recently sold out)

• Bedtime Stories for the End of the World! by Daniel Borzutzky 
• scenes from the lives of my parents by Pattie McCarthy 

 Currently in Print

• Bound: The First Array by various (6 chapbooks in 1 volume)
• Hymn: An Ovulution by Mel Coyle & Jenn Marie Nunes
• Knotted by Alyssa Lynee
• Sympathetic Nervous System by Jackie Clark 
• The Woman, the Mirror, the Eye by Maureen Thorson

 Forthcoming in 2015–2016

I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel by Nikki Wallschlaeger 

Inherit by Ginger Ko 

First the Burning & Then the Witches by Catie Rosemurgy 

Exercises in Painting by Khadijah Queen 

Sandra Simonds: Mini tour in NY State

Thursday, October 29: BUFFALO, NY

Sandra Simonds 

Visiting Poets Series
St. Bonaventure University
The Loft at Quick Center for the Arts
Cornelius Welch Drive
St. Bonaventure, NY 
5:30 p.m.

Saturday, October 31: NEW YORK, NY

Sandra Simonds with Mel Nichols

Segue Series
Zinc Bar
82 W. 3rd Street
New York, NY
4:30 p.m.

Get The Sonnets

Get Warsaw Bikini

(Hint: See lots more readings by Bloof poets on our Events calendar!)

WINDOWBOXING by Kirsten Kaschock, now in free ebook formats

Interactive PDF for online reading  (above or here)
Color cover image, black-and-white interior

PDF for printing (2.1 MB, illustrations)
Color cover image, black-and-white interior

WINDOWBOXING: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts

Kirsten Kaschock

Gray textured 80 lb cover 
Three die cut windows with cream vellum insets
Cream 70 lb text interior
Hand-sewn binding in natural twine
7 x 7 inches • 44 pages
Includes 6 black-and-white drawings by Koen Kaschock-Marenda

Excerpt:

"You would have my explosions be localized and armed against themselves.
You would prefer I not discuss 'men' or 'women.' The genres.
It would be better to prevent the spread of the insurgency."
—from [WINDOWNER]

A sequence of twenty-four interlinked pieces, WINDOWBOXING: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts by Kirsten Kaschock moves with both muscle and grace through its three acts of steadfast looking—at dance, grief, abuse, the streets of Philadelphia, and especially "the elaboration of woman."

Excerpts from this work appeared in Antioch Review, BOMBMagazine, Chicago Review, Everyday Genius, Many Mountains Moving, and Otoliths.

Kirsten Kaschock is the author of three books of poetry: The Dottery (Pitt Poetry, Donald Hall Prize, 2014), Unfathoms (Slope Editions) and A Beautiful Name for a Girl (Ahsahta Press). Her debut novel, Sleight, a work of speculative fiction, was published by Coffee House Press. She has earned a PhD in English from the University of Georgia and a PhD in dance from Temple University. Kirsten resides in Philadelphia with Dan Marenda and their three children. More at kaschock.wordpress.com.

WINDOWBOXING: A Dance with Saints in Three Acts is the fifth chapbook in the 2012–2013 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series will be released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release. Each chapbook is also included in full in our annual compilation volume, Bound.

Danielle Pafunda mini tour begins October 23: Durham NC, Casper WY, Boulder CO

Friday, October 23: DURHAM, NC

Danielle Pafunda

Work V. 5

Duke University

East Duke Building, Parlors

1304 Campus Drive
Durham, NC 27708

8:00 p.m.

The Work Series is designed to give a writer/filmmaker/painter a chance to read from/show a longer suite/work in progress. Hosted by David Need, Depts. of Religion & Women's Studies.

Monday, October 26: CASPER, WY

Danielle Pafunda with Mathias Svalina

University of Wyoming

Details TK

Tuesday, October 27: BOULDER, CO

Danielle Pafunda with Harmony Holiday & Carolina Ebeid

Naropa University

Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics

Performing Arts Center

2130 Arapahoe Avenue

7:30 p.m.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books, 2013), Manhater (Dusie Press, 2012), Iatrogenic: Their Testimonies (Noemi Press, 2010), My Zorba (Bloof Books 2008), and Pretty Young Thing (Soft Skull Press, 2005). Her poems have appeared in three editions of The Best American Poetry. Her work has been anthologized in Beauty Is a Verb: The Poetry of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press, 2011), Gurlesque: The New Grrly, Grotesque, Burlesque Poetics (Saturnalia Books, 2010), and Not for Mothers Only: Contemporary Poems on Child-Getting & Child Rearing(Fence Books, 2007). She is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

Danielle's latest book, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison is available from SPD, and Bloof will be offering it in new edition later this year.

Reprints in Progress: Bound, Drunk by Noon & The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway

We're working on it.

Bound: The First Array + Drunk by Noon  and The Mystery of the Hidden Driveway by Jennifer L. Knox are temporarily out of stock, but reprints are being ordered.

We'll leave them active in the store, but know that if you order this week or next there will be a slight delay. We'll keep you posted via email. (Thank you for loving our books!)

Knotted. by Alyssa Lynee

New! The third issue of the Bloof Books 2015 chapbook series is here. We are so excited to bring you Alyssa Lynee's debut, Knotted.

Sorry, this chapbook is sold out. A free PDF version is coming soon.

Knotted. 
Alyssa Lynee

Hand sewn in natural twine
Antique Gray Linen covers with full-color ink jet print
White or natural 60 lb. text interior
7 x 8 inches
36 pages
$8.00*

*Domestic shipping for US and Canada only. For international shipping, contact us at sales at bloof books dot com.

Bloof Books Chapbook Series
Vol. 3: Issue 3 (2015)
ISSN: 2373-163x
LIMITED TO 100 COPIES

"There is no known treatment." Part fantasy and part autobiography, the tender, tentative, and brutally perceptive poems in Knotted. explore what common humanity might be shared between a young woman poet and an infamous killer, whose lives and circumstances overlap in some ways, diverge in others. What does it mean to suspect oneself of the worst, to compare oneself to an extreme example of depravity, to be simultaneously compassionate and complicit?

Excerpt:

Inquiry

I found out twenty-five people are writing about him
after I sent a poem to try and be published.
I got rejected but how weird that so many
submissions were about Gacy right?
All these words can be arranged
better I get that. But this apartment
is so quiet and no one has called me
today and yesterday I watched a
documentary about a woman the world
forgot. Her bones found four years later,
sunk into a rotting couch,
tv still on and bowls in the sink.

I wonder about their names
their intentions:

Did Sufjan Stevens have any bearing in your decision of subject?

If so, what line in particular stood out to you?

What interests you the most about John Wayne Gacy, Jr.?

What is poem attempting to say?

Do you feel he is speaking to you at all?

                                                            [would you do that?]

---

Read more at PANK.

Cover illustrations: Engraving of three monsters from De monstrorum causis, natura et differentiis by Fortunio Liceti, first published in Padua, Italy in 1616. Artist unknown. Public domain.

Knotted. is the third chapbook in the 2015 series from Bloof Books. Each chapbook in the series is released in a limited edition of one hundred numbered copies, followed by a digital release, and a year-end combination volume called Bound.

Alyssa Lynee teaches and lives in Chicago. Her work can be found in PANK magazine and forthcoming in Bloom.

The Quotidian Bee: our new poem-a-day publication at Medium

The Quotidian Bee

Sandra Simonds has a new author website (and a new book!)

Please visit Sandra at her new online home, and update your old bookmarks and links:

sandrasimondspoet.com

While checking out her new site, be sure to read up on Sandra's new book, Steal It Back, coming soon from our friends Saturnalia. (It's actually already available via SPD, but officially in stores in December.)

Natalie Eilbert is in the New Yorker & reviewed at the Rumpus!

Yes! Natalie Eilbert has a poem, "The Limits of What We Can Do," in this week's New Yorker! 

Read it here, and pick up a copy at a newsstand near you.

Also, SWAN FEAST has been reviewed glowingly by Julie Marie Wade at The Rumpus: 

"If Beauty is dead—beauty in the form of pretty, in the form of dresses that remind us of girls with curls and angels with halos, who of course evoke goodness and sweetness and also a feminized kind of learned helplessness—what then will rise to succeed the angels, to replace the dresses?"

Read the rest here.

Don't have a copy yet? 

Our friends at SPD have them in stock here (so please get one there—because we are dying to print new ones as soon as those are sold out). 

September Newsletter

Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place by Sharon Mesmer Sharon Mesmer’s poetry is a stream of indomitable spunk . . . tough and lush . . . a fabulous tissue of language which floats out to inhabit other bodies, opens their mouths and makes them speak. —Alice Notley Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place is Sharon Mesmer's fifth collection of "tough and lush" poetry. Unwaveringly energetic and relentlessly wry, Mesmer fashions poems from the flashiest trash of the American sensibility and the Internet's muckiest dumping grounds, with a swagger and intelligence all her own. Hers is a generous spirit: "I want to expose myself," confesses one piece, "for love of the people." Visit the Bloof Blog for more information & excerpts from the book. PREORDER it via Square or PayPal

PHILALALIA is this week!  Bloof will be in Philadelphia this Thursday, Friday & Saturday, to take part in the second annual Philalalia Small Press // Handmade Books & Art Fair. Please stop by the bookfair at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, to check out our table. We'll have Jennifer L. Knox's (early!) new book, Days of Shame & Failure, Philalalia-exclusive mini broadsides by Khadijah Queen, Alyssa Lynee, Ginger Ko, and Nikki Wallshlaeger, as well as our full assortment of books and handmades. On Friday night, we're reading with Black Radish Books & Propolis Press at Snockey's, featuring Natalie Eilbert, Jackie Clark, Becca Klaver (whose Bloof book has just been announced), and K. Lorraine Graham (ditto, and see below). Full festival schedule Friday night reading UPCOMING EVENTS Other September & October events featuring Bloof poets include: → Wed 9/16 in New York, NY Page Meets Stage: Natalie Eilbertwith Danez Smith → Thu 9/24 in Rock Island, IL Spectra Series: Nikki Wallschlaeger with Lauren K. Alleyne & Marc Rahe → Thu 9/24 in New York, NY Best American Poetry Series launch: Sandra Simonds…among many others, at the New School → Sat 10/3 in New York, NY Segue Series: Sharon Mesmerwith Bruce Andrews & Drew Gardner's Poetics Orchestra → Tue 10/6 in Iowa City, IA Prairie Lights Bookstore: Jennifer L. Knox launch reading for Days of Shame & Failure Visit our Events page for details.

Four Wonders of the Future Huzzah! Bloof will be republishing these 4 recent books in spiffy new editions and rolling them over into our own distribution, after their (quickly dwindling!) first editions sell out: Motherlover by Ginger Ko, The Dead Girls Speak in Unison by Danielle Pafunda, Swan Feast by Natalie Eilbert, and The Rest is Censored by K. Lorraine Graham. Bloof Books​ is thrilled to add these new books to our catalog. And to welcome K. Lorraine Graham as a new member of the collective! You'll find links to them on our site—pointing to in-stock copies at SPD, Powell's, and other indie bookstores. Thanks, as always, for reading our books & supporting small press poetry. See you next month, Bloof

Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place by Sharon Mesmer

Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place at Square Market

Or via PayPal:

Sharon Mesmer’s poetry is a stream of indomitable spunk . . . tough and lush . . . a fabulous tissue of language which floats out to inhabit other bodies, opens their mouths and makes them speak. —Alice Notley

Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place is Sharon Mesmer's fifth collection of "tough and lush" poetry. Unwaveringly energetic and relentlessly wry, Mesmer fashions poems from the flashiest trash of the American sensibility and the Internet's muckiest dumping grounds, with a swagger and intelligence all her own. Hers is a generous spirit: "I want to expose myself," confesses one piece, "for love of the people."

full cover design

EXCERPTS

"This Poet" at Bloof Books

"The Swiss Just Do Whatever" at Poetry Magazine

"This Gorilla Called Phillip Sidney" at Evergreen Review 

Misc. performances at PennSound


PRAISE FOR SHARON MESMER

With great wit, the poetry of Sharon Mesmer plunders the new realism of digital space, with its wishes, lies, and “ever-shifting Brangelina alerts.” Her introductory poem, written in the voice of a beginning fantasy novel writer, announces, “I’d like to see / a ninja zombie pirate robot wizard / that is made of some kind of meat. / Preferably bacon.” A shrewd satire on poetics, “This Poet” consists entirely of questions that might have been asked an overzealous workshop director: “How does this poet reveal her basic nature, / her mortal wound? / Is it through her choice of Dog?” Profane and delirious, this is the Divine Comedy of our postmodern Eden. —Paul Hoover

Whatever it is you need to take you beyond your humdrum life—emus, golden human women with kitten hands, clown deer, labial wings, the forlorn mildew of Dorian Gray, blintzes, pet fungal onions, toy anal ATMs, or tiny uni-cows—Sharon Mesmer’s poetry has it. It’s encyclopedic! It radiates comic intelligence with a rare ferocity, like a Borscht Belt act. Add to cart! —Nada Gordon

No matter what form Mesmer’s words are taking at the moment, jokes—actual jokes that go “hardy-har-har!” at you, me, “I,” dogs, trees, astronauts—pop up like vermin in a Whack-a-mole game. No one is safe. Elbows, two-by-fours, knuckle sandwiches, and banana peels fly. Perhaps her most fixed form is that of Mesmie, the ninth Stooge. —Jennifer L. Knox, Best American Poetry blog

Parodying the come-ons of capitalism, Mesmer surprises us with access to something we hadn’t considered wanting, an arch anger that is surprisingly accepting of the compromises situations push on people, while at the same time smoldering with acidic resentment, as if Mesmer forgave the compromiser only to feel doubly incensed at the leveraged situations prodding us to inauthenticity. —Stan Apps, Jacket

. . . always interesting, beautifully bold and vivaciously modern. —Allen Ginsberg

ABOUT THE POET

Sharon Mesmer (photo by Esther Levine)

Sharon Mesmer is a poet, fiction writer, and essayist. Her previous poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch (Combo Books, 2008), The Virgin Formica (Hanging Loose Press, 2008), Vertigo Seeks Affinities (chapbook, Belladonna Books, 2007), Half Angel, Half Lunch (Hard Press, 1998), and Crossing Second Avenue (chapbook, ABJ Press, Tokyo, 1997). Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago (Hachette Littératures, Paris, in French translation by Daniel Bismuth, 2005), In Ordinary Time (Hanging Loose Press, 2005), and The Empty Quarter (Hanging Loose Press, 2005). She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and the New School. Originally from Chicago, she has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988.

This Poet: Sharon Mesmer

Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place
Sharon Memser (Bloof, 2015)

This Poet

This Poet is for Edwin Torres, adapted from Chris Lofting’s writings on the I Ching.

What visible corporeal form does this poet present?
In what traditional nuances does she come “dressed”?
Does she suggest a hidden half-life of carefully maintained traditions?
Or does she eschew these nuances,
in favor of breaking off relations with the past?
If so, do earlier assertions lose their verity?
If not, is there a fraught relationship with the past?

Does this poet successfully express “commence”?
Does she stand up without weakness to say her piece,
ignoring criticisms or challenges to her origin story?
Does she demonstrate the ability to successfully streamline
the long history of prosody into the treasured figure
of a golden human woman with kitten hands?

How does this poet reveal her basic nature,
her mortal wound?
Is it through her choice of dog?
And does that choice reveal (perhaps unwittingly) that, at nightfall,
her mind is too often beset with danger and blame,
and wondering about that wavering light behind the viaduct?
Does the inclusion of a viaduct support an as yet undeveloped
theory of beauty?
If so, what is her relation, if any, to beauty?
From what mud has this poet arisen, or
from what known or as yet undiscovered star has she descended?
How does she “sprout”?
How does her dog “sprout”?
Does her dog “sprout”?

Are there inevitable entanglements with syntactical intention
that this poet successfully manages to avoid?
If not, what are the unfortunate consequences?
Is she so deeply in disagreement with her own sentience
that she fails to teach social skills, the patience for opportunity,
the ability to recognize and negotiate subtle gateways?
How does she compromise/express uniformity, or at least meet halfway
the need for the establishment of such gateways?
Does she successfully compete in free-market fashion
while keeping the engine of her competition hidden?

What is her relation, if any, to beauty?
Does she seem to suggest the quantifying of such an unstable,
unreliable (and even vilifying) property as beauty?

First of all, does she even suggest an instability?
Does she lay personal claim to unquantifiability?
Are any properties at all suggested?
Or does she automatically devolve to mirroring?
If so, is there a hidden meaning in the mirroring,
and by what methods (grounded in the text or otherwise located)
can it be accurately gleaned?

Does she suggest the presence of a body crown?
And then provide specific guidances about how to ground,
frame, and then leverage that body crown for greater gains?
Can she adequately assess, then communicate—
in normative syntax, with a clear purview—
the purpose and worth of her own (markedly obvious) body crown?
And can she successfully balance that crown against the pure gold
of tradition, spun from air?

Does she make small gains that can be noticed, tracked?
And is this because of some carefully preserved piquant fragment
of a fraught past?
Does this fragment allow her to provide, without fanfare, and little preparation,
her own humble supper?
Does it confer the ability to traverse a thorny path carefully, gracefully,
successfully,
and, while navigating, maintain balance and harmony
in the midst of sudden, irreversible—even tragic—
changes to the landscape?

Can this poet’s many obstacles,
so obviously and firmly set, and working against one another,
maintain a unified field, or at least work to neutralize unexpected attacks
from hostile, outside sources, on the poet’s core beliefs?
Can these obstacles, through their own natures and mortal wounds,
express empathy with readers both hostile to and in sync with
this poet’s basic aims?
Does this poet insult, consciously or unconsciously, the like-minded?
Can it be suggested that she try to prevent this?
If so, what form would the suggestion take?
Since something is to be accomplished, is it necessary
that she have “friends”?

Can these “friends” suggest judicious choices regarding
the density of a center,
and the successful deploying all “ghost words” cleverly
from that center?
Can they suggest that this poet’s center pragmatically oversee all
“ghost word operations,” successfully managing antithetical stimuli
so that these stimuli push the poet’s ideology forward effectively,
without giving offense, so that nothing
remains unfurthered?

How do these ideas identify as “friends”?
Especially as relating to a fraught past (if any; this has not yet been determined).
Would a clear-cut ideology of friends allow words to accrue
(naturally or unnaturally) to actual facts?
Can these ideas-as-friends-as-facts successfully riverboat all ideologies
without exception, and additionally, with appropriate breadth, purity
and sustaining power,
affirm that the poet’s innate enmities will not froth continually forth against
her principle expression?

In spite of these innate enmities, does this poet manage to find, express,
and celebrate a faith?
And if so, what is that faith?
Can the faith be expressed succinctly, gracefully in dependable,
forward-moving time?
Or is it a “faith” counter to the essential principles of forward-moving time?
Does the “faith” question chronos? Elevate kairos?
If no, or if so, how does the poet correct this corruption?
Indeed, does she even successfully express this kind of dichotomy
as a corruption?

Is this poet “successful”?
Is this poet “beautiful”?
Does this poet express “value”?
Does she acquiesce sufficiently to the low,
defer appropriately to the high?
Reflect precise cognizance of her station?
Does this poet actively elicit admiration,
or passively attract by innuendo, association?
Does she “housekeep” properly,
clearing chaff before incorporating wheat?
Are those fragrant boughs on her threshold?
Do those boughs “add value”?

Does this poet engage in a nonlocated, disembodied spiritual ethos,
providing little or no solutions to our lives’ demands?
Is this her way of expressing—indeed experiencing—
states of mind that are exceedingly seductive, even addictive?
Is this poet “addicted”?
And, if so, is she successfully “addicted”?

Will this poet move politely beyond what is required?
Or will she “showboat?” “Crow?” “Grandstand?” “Badger?” “Preen”?
Can she express her excess per established mainstream conventions?
If no, how might she ultimately assert containment/control?
And will she add normative, recognizable value to that control?
If so, does her work let slip the idea that she believes that control
to be “beautiful”?

Does this poet “woo” you with a restrained enticement?
Or does she draw you in, potential compeer, by enticing with
a practiced, crafted insouciance?
Is this poet lying to/using/exploiting you?
Is she asking too much of her interlocutor, her responder?
Or is her interlocutor/responder projecting personal issues neither contained
nor addressed by the poet,
but rather issues related to, for example, an untended relationship
with a needy parent?

Does this poet bring something—anything—into the light?
And is this light a fair trope that can be described, pointed to, aimed at?
Would you say that the phrase “omnia quae sunt, lumina sunt”
is a valid assessment of the light’s role vis-à-vis the poet?
Does the poet know how to protect this light if the light feels
it lies unprotected as it has not yet come into its time?
Does the light exit the precincts of the poet insulted?
Why has the poet violated the light’s role?
Does the poet believe that insulting her (admittedly) chosen, fair trope of light
adds normative, recognizable value?
Can these missteps—if indeed they be missteps—
be successfully corrected?

Does this poet have the ability to gracefully deploy rigid structure
as a form of surface-tension release?
Can she “mirror” or effectively deal with opposition?
Does she obstruct, go against, stand up to, the general flow?
What is her position with regard to the flow?
(And the flow’s position regarding the poet?)
Is there a standoff?
Is the standoff obstinate? Flawed?
Or a necessary enhancement of value?
Can the standoff be pressed upon to yield?
Or should this poet ultimately be forced to release the standoff
through a faux-relaxed structure plan, attainable within, say,
three or four stanzaic elements?
And can the standoff be asked to track changes
in the poet’s will to change?
Is the will to change too much to expect of this poet?
Does this poet exhibit a will to change?

Will this poet ever achieve normative, recognizable value?
Will she someday “seed” her meanings successfully?
Is she fated to always become overly entangled with something/someone?
Can she learn to remain integrated within her own context,
either by the subtle hand of craftsmanship
or strenuous slave-master boundary effort?

Is the life of this poet already delimited?
From where does she get her nutrition?
How does she express conversion from the raw to the cooked,
vulgar to sacrosanct?
Has she ever genuflected, bestowed roses?

How does this poet express discernment, gradual development, maturity?
Has she expended her energy too soon?
Is her natural exuberance completely shot?
What happened to her original radiance, her abundance overflowing?
What complications dictated her choice of dog?
What complications were the result?

Did this poet express her goals too intensely?
Did she standardise?
Did she fail to express empathy?
Did she not successfully protect a soft core by fronting a hard exterior?
If so, has this poet “failed”?

Did this poet ever, at any point, “get it right?”
And if she does, does she do so by engaging in focused, framed self-sabotage,
rejecting the work of making things clear,
eschewing her (purported) goal of revealing the roots of foolishness
by gently dispelling the cloud of unknowing?
Despite her flaws, her wrongs, her sins against convention and taste,
can she still cultivate a reader and become, ultimately,
through a “Pontius Pilate’s mosquito” sort of notoriety, influential?

Is the value of this poet simply that she enables engagement?
That she demonstrates the capacity to be present and open,
not grasping at or rejecting either presence or the transcendence of presence,
and thus her openness remains (and retains) a natural adjectival sublime?

Should this poet continue to strive for success
despite her aggressive actions against agency,
her obsessive reanimations of highly personal pied moments,
the consistent shifting of her attentions away
from an immediately visible, comprehensible form
to a postponed instress of questionably pleasurable shock?
Should she blame herself for her failure to cause a bear to appear,
her lack of a proper dog?
And if that failure indeed rests upon the lack of a proper dog,
what dog would be the right dog?
From what kennel, if any, would it come?
And can that lack be remedied?
Ultimately, could it be?
In a final assessment, should it be?