Greetings from My Girlie Leisure Place at Square Market
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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."
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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
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| 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.
