Fiction in the latest Big Bridge

I continue to lack time to blog in detail about Versal Magazine from Amsterdam and the translocal, or about the importance of supporting a public option in the upcoming push for better health care in the U.S. (currently ranked an impressive 37th in the world!), or the California education crisis that’s making my work life extremely miserable even while I’m not yet teaching.

In the meantime I thought I’d point people here to the new issue of Big Bridge, #14. While some sections of Big Bridge (including significant features on Slow Poetry and the Post-Beat Anthology) are likely to get more attention, I wanted to highlight the fiction section of the magazine, edited by Vernon Frazer (who also edited the Post-Beat Anthology). There’s a lot of good contemporary poetry on the web, but fiction much less so. I think the presence of this feature, and Vernon’s work in putting it together, deserves some kudos.

Frazer has gathered work by some fine contemporary fiction writers (including a few who are good friends of mine): Mel Freilicher, Eric Beeny, Stefani Christova, Lynda Schor, David Madgalene, Stephen-Paul Martin, Susan Smith Nash, Andy Stewart, Richard Martin, Peter Conners, Ann Bogle, Jefferson Hansen, Carol Novack. Many of these writers share things in common with the concept of Submodern Fiction, which I wrote about in the three issues of the magazine I co-edited (along with K. Lorraine Graham) under that name. I posted on my blog awhile back the editorial I wrote for the first issue of Submodern Fiction.

My longtime friend Jeff Hansen, whose stories “Guardian” and "Venezuela, Africa" appear in the issue, has also just published a novel, ...and Beefheart Saved Craig, on Blaze Vox, which is well worth buying and reading. I know because I read it to write the blurb:

This book comes at readers from all angles, literally, with its energetic mix of innovative narrative, informed cultural criticism, and good old-fashioned character development about life among the drinking classes. Hansen’s absolutely contemporary questioning of individual identity spins out through a story about some ordinary and ornery people whose mundane lives are paradoxically compelling and often shocking. The characters are always thinking even if they don’t think they are, and the result is a novel in which boredom, pain, humor, and the unexpected swoop through the rubble of what everybody seems most sure about. In a way that keeps readers guessing right to the final word, ....and Beefheart saved Craig shows how philosophy and getting through the day are much more tangled up than so-called common sense often suggests.

Jeff’s novel is experimental and highly readable, theoretically sophisticated and down to earth. It’s about a group of people who are more lost than they know, and it’s about how physiology, psychology and large scale social dynamics powerfully affect people. ...and Beefheart Saved Craig can be bought at Blaze Vox, Small Press Distribution, or, if you must, Amazon.

And if you don't know Jeff's blog Experimental Fiction / Poetry / Jazz, you'll find there a wealth of reviews, interviews and other commentaries, done by him and other writers, that is a great source of information.

Lastly, I’m very glad of course that some fiction of my own appears in Big Bridge 14. It’s the first chapter of my novel The Quarry and The Lot, which Blaze Vox is planning to publish in early 2011. It’s a significant departure from much of my other fiction, the closest I’ve ever come to writing straightforward realism, although I also hope I’m playing some worthwhile games with the problem of narrative voice and perception. Among many things, the novel tries to provide a framework for understanding how American life changed in the 1980s and how it affected a group of people just reaching adulthood at that time. And I think it has more than a bit to say about what life in the American suburbs, especially the Washington DC suburbs, where I grew up, is like.

So if you want access to some worthwhile current fiction on the web, Big Bridge #14 is where I’d suggest that you look.

from Dead Carnival: The Disjunctions and Conjunctions of the Fragments and Unities

Kenny Goldsmith’s typically provocative but also typically incorrect claim recently that “Disjunction is Dead,” and the intriguing follow up post and discussion on Nada Gordon’s blog, reminded me of the following section from my novel Dead Carnival.

The issue I take up in it has to do with the problems of fragmentation and unity both in fiction and in philosophy, of focus and distraction, argument and digression. But I think they resonate pretty closely with dynamics of disjunction and conjunction in poetry, synthesis and the rejected, and also even with recent discussions around the notion of the hybrid as something that either disrupts genres and traditions or unifies them. It also highlights the problem of what used to be called, back in the Golden Days of Theory, a binary opposition.

This section of the novel was probably written 10 or 15 years ago. It’s one of the many essay moments in a novel that includes essays, plays, poems, and multiple story lines. A hybrid monstrosity that connects and disconnects various genres (the essay here is a fairly good description of some aspects of the novel). I might now change one or two of the ways that I said things in the section (my conventional and questionable use of the metaphor of blindness now bugs me), but its ideas still ring true to me.

What does it mean to be distracted? What does it mean to digress?

Looking around, it's hard not to conclude that distraction is a bad thing. Perhaps more than ever, the supposedly civilized human mind exists in a constant state of distraction. It's practically impossible to focus on anything. At any given moment, there's something else waiting to grab your attention. It's not just a matter of entertainment, a question of what to do with free time, whether to watch movies, exercise, go out for dinner or drinks, take drugs, develop a hobby. It's that focus has become increasingly impossible even in the work one wants to do. We never seem allowed more than a little time to concentrate on anything. Now that jobs have become so unstable, how much more time do people spend thinking about what their next job will be? It's hard to focus today on the job you were hired for when you know you may need another tomorrow. Besides, it's hard to focus on things one needs to do on a job when those things always change too; here's the new computer system, the new rules and regulations, the new competition. And maybe we shouldn't even speak about those whose world is not so simply divided into jobs and entertainment. What can we say about those who think of their real work as something not a job, that can't be defined by wages and possibility for advancement, but by the chance for creation? What can we say about those who see entertainment, however entertaining at times, as simply a displacement of a more significant human value, which is play? How does one play anymore, if one means by play the chance to participate in games that might change who you and others are, whereas entertainment is simply the things you do in the time you have off from the work you don't want to do? How easy it is to be distracted from that creative work that is perhaps the same as creative play. You want to create, but your bank book is empty, or you have to go to dinner with someone you don't like. So creation will have to wait.

Looking around, it's hard not to conclude that distraction is a good thing. Perhaps more than ever, the human mind is constantly in a state of tunnel vision. I must organize my present, future, past. I must have goals I can clearly express to others. Anything that doesn’t fit the pattern, that can't be immediately centered around the goal at hand, must be rejected, denied, eliminated. If the need to function increasingly takes up all human time, then anything that lies outside that functionality gets perceived as being in the way. In such a situation, distraction becomes a necessary reminder that human life is about more than functioning. Distraction points out how much lies beyond the state of tunnel vision. Distraction reminds us that the things we're trying to forget might be the most interesting of all, it reminds us that some things can never be organized or unified in the name of the goal. Here I was trying to develop a new credit card, but somehow I find myself listening to music. Distraction reminds us that the urge to unify, to control the world in the name of what we intend, can never be the whole story, that it’s crucial to have one's mind wander, to recognize there are things one does not know, to understand that perhaps we are most alive when we are discovering, not when we are controlling.

Some thinkers will have it that all these distractions are leading to a world where people never take any significant action, because they are buffeted relentlessly by this and that. To these thinkers, human beings are becoming dangerously fragmented. These thinkers want a way to avoid fragmentation, so people can be returned to feelings of unity.

To other thinkers, the attempt to impose unity, to see everything in terms of the tunnel vision of the goal, has made the world unlivable. To these people, fragmentation is the savior of a world that has become too controlled. They want fragmentation to break down the illusion of unity.

It's hard not to see that both types of thinkers have a point. But I can't help believing that both of them also miss the point. Because the question seems like it can't be whether one is pro-unity or pro-fragment. Rather, the question seems when does unity help us, when does fragmentation help us? And the question seems also, isn't it true we will always have unity sometimes when it doesn't help, always have fragmentation sometimes when it doesn't help?

One can hardly be in favor of a world, for instance, in which someone's mind is bouncing from one thing to another so fast that they can't think, work, love, even tie their shoes. Similarly, one doesn't want to live in a world where people are so obsessed with their goals that they kill everything that doesn't fit the picture.

Perhaps we've all known people who digress because they have no idea what they're saying. Such people don't even know they don't know what they're saying; people who knew they didn't know what they were saying might be interesting to hear, because one could hear them discover what they're saying. But people who don't know what they're saying, and don't know they don't know it, are at best boring, and at worst deadly.

But perhaps we've also known people who seem so certain about what they're saying that they're not believable for an instant. Such people don't digress; they know, apparently, everything already, and all that remains is to tell us about it. But their certainty makes them blind, for whenever they come across something that doesn't fit with what they're sure they know, they can't see it. People who think they know everything, and who ignore anything that differs from what they know, are at best boring, and at worst deadly.

People who don't know they don't know what they're saying, and people who think they know everything they're saying, turn out often to be the same people.

What most interests me, here, is the idea of conscious digression. Conscious digression prevents any simple unity between things. It doesn't try to make the world add up to a new tunnel vision. But it is equally not the chaotic words of people who can’t help anyone because they're so busy being distracted they don't even know when someone is listening. Conscious digression suggests there are times when certain things might almost be unified, that, if no exact unity exists, similarities do, and those similarities matter. But it also suggests that one must not make too much of similarity; one must remember to digress precisely at that moment when it would be a mistake to tie up all loose ends.

A narrative of conscious digression would be one in which there is not one story but many, but those stories would be related. But it would also be a narrative in which the moment one tried to say it all added up, that everything was similarly headed in the same direction, one would find that the pieces didn’t fit, that some things could not be made to belong. Even when things did belong, they would not belong in order to tell one story with one meaning, but to say that many stories together might have many meanings. There might even be a central story, but it would not be the only story, nor would it be one that could exist without the others. And it would not be a story easily made complete.

Now that I'm thinking about all this, it reminds me of something else...

But I digress.

PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Anthology

PRESS: A Cross-Cultural Literary Anthology, is now online as the current issue of Wheelhouse Magazine Online. It commemorates the PRESS: Activism and the Avant-Garde conference that I was part of at Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, in May 2008, and features work by many of the great writers invited to that event.

My own work in the anthology is not the fairly long poem I read at the conference, a piece from The End of America, Book 2, which was certainly more directly related to the concerns of the event. But the anthology does contain several pieces from my collection Party In My Body, which as of yet has never appeared as a book.

Great thanks to David Wolach and Elizabeth Williamson for their hard work on the conference, and to all the other students and professors who participated in ensuring that the conference was fascinating and worthwhile for all involved.

Sound Poetry in Belgium and The Netherlands

Photos (Top to Bottom):

Olaf Risee at Gallerie Link (Ghent)
Tine Moniek at Gallerie Link (Gehnt)
Philip Meersman at Gallerie Link (Ghent)
Frank Keizer and Samuel Vriezen at Cafe de Jaren (Amsterdam)
Rozalie Hirs and Jaap Blonk at Cafe de Jaren (Amsterdam)


One of the most interesting elements (if not entirely unexpected, given who we were meeting) of my reading and poetry tour with K. Lorraine Graham was the prevalence of sound poetry and sound poets in both Belgium and Amsterdam. After our reading in Ghent, we were given in the improv portion of the evening a performance of a number of poems that highlighted sound effects as an additional element to the words themselves or that dispensed with words entirely, replacing them with sound and gesture.

That evening opened a conversation about sound poetry that continued through our stay in Ghent and expanded when we went to Amsterdam. There, we met with Dutch poets (as distinguished from the international English-language poets we also met in Amsterdam, whom I’ll say more about later), Jaap Blonk, Rozalie Hirs, Samuel Vriezen, along with a younger protege Frank Keizer. They said they thought of much of what they did as being at least as much music as poetry, and they referred to themselves as musicians and composers as well as poets.

For a few years now I’ve been living in San Diego without an active community of writers that understands itself as a community (a scattered handful of creative writing professors transplanted from other parts of the country doesn’t quite a “community” make). In that time I’ve felt more and more in my many visits to different cities and their writing communities that I can distinguish a few regional features in most of the many writing communities I’ve visited.

It’s not accidental that I’ve discussed film and visual art with poets in Los Angeles, that poets in DC tend to see politics as part of the fabric of daily living instead of as a platform for polemic, that poets in Vancouver often worry about the relationship of the city to the region’s Native American heritage, or that innovative poets in Portland tend to see themselves as trying to move away from a tradition that, as Mary Rose Larkin said when we were there, historically emphasized “salmon and feelings.”

Before anyone attacks me here for generalizing, let me emphasize that I understand these are overall impressions, hardly ones that account for what every single poet is doing in every single city. They come from the environment of those places, ones that varying poets pick up or not to various degrees. While in Europe, I found myself considering what it was about Belgium and Amsterdam that made sound poetry a key element of non-traditional poetry in those places.

Of course it’s crucial not to go overboard here. Part of the reason Lorraine and I heard so many sound poems in Ghent was simply hospitality to visitors. The poets performing in Ghent understood that their visitors wouldn’t understand poems in Flemish and so some of them presented work designed to include us, although it was fascinating how easily I could tell the difference between the content of sound poems and more traditional lyric poems in Flemish simply by how they sounded. And as reading series host Helen White pointed out, the prevalence of sound poetry was also simply a function of the particular communities of poets with whom we were meeting. Obviously there are many poets in Belgium and The Netherlands who have no interest in sound poetry.

And yet, given all that, I still think that interest in sound poetry has something to do with the region in question, a place where multiple languages interact daily and the political and cultural issues implied by those languages have long been pressing questions.

Ron Silliman is fond of saying that all sound poetry really explores the same aesthetic question, which he calls “the excess of the signifier.” That is, sound poetry always calls attention to those aspects of language and vocalization which go beyond being merely words that provide identifications with things. It’s not so much that Silliman’s point is wrong than that it’s insufficient, a little like saying “music is organized sound” as a way of having the final word about what makes music interesting. As just one for instance in the nature of the problem, sound beyond words still does signify. Emotion, mood, pattern are just some of the ways that sound, like music, tells us something without conventional description.

In Belgium the train stations featured information in four languages, and the numbers of different languages in use by people moving through the stations were many more than that. Of course the fact that negotiating multiple languages is a fact of life in Belgium doesn’t mean that everyone speaks all the more common languages equally well, or that there are no cultural or political splits defined along language lines. The differences between the Flemish (closely related to Dutch) and French speaking portions of Belgium are only the most obvious of those splits and are partly what has made English a popular language among people in Belgium, especially younger, college-educated people. English allows Belgian citizens a way of communicating with each other that sidesteps cultural and regional bias, even while the growing international power of English remains an issue.

One advantage of the sound poem in such an environment is therefore not that it’s incomprehensible because it doesn’t use words, but that it’s comprehensible, almost to everyone. It doesn’t limit your work to the Dutch, French, English, or German speaking portion of your audience. Precisely because it relies on the emotive and structural qualities of sound and doesn’t use words, it’s cross-linguistic. Of course the meaning of sound is not universal, an obvious enough fact that Jaap Blonk’s theoretical work has explored in detail, but nonetheless it allows for some level of communication across languages that speaking to each other in different languages doesn’t

Blonk remains the most well-known of the sound poets we met, and was clearly much admired by many of the younger generation of writers I spoke with. His theoretical work has been globally rigorous in exploring the sounds created by multiple languages and the physical actions necessary to create sounds. His performances often feature interaction between sounds made in different languages, always in striking juxtaposition. CDs and other recordings by Hirs (who a few months back had actually been in San Diego and gave a performance sponsored by the UCSD music department; who knew?) and Vriezen ( see http://www.xs4all.nl/~sqv/ ) have also been providing me with fascinating post-trip listening.

In Ghent, before going to Amsterdam, we were treated to many different kinds of sound performances. Xavier Roelens gave a very funny performance of two words that took his in-character narrator a long time to finish saying. Jelle Meander performed a piece highlighting certain sounds of morning in Ghent. Tine Moniek performed a piece called “Tsunami” that, while we didn’t know what specific kind of tsunami her poem literally was about, followed the tsunami’s development sound-wise. Olaf Risee performed several lively poems that might well be considered Dutch slam-poetry. And Philip Meersman also performed a poem that was not technically a sound poem but that solidified my impression about the relation between sound poetry and cultural context. His poem was in six different languages, not all of which were known to any single person in the room except for him, with the result that at least some portion of his poem was only a sound poem for every member of the audience. It wasn’t meant as a display of language virtuosity, though it certainly was also that, but as a very pointed exploration of what it means to be able to understand other people or not.

The fact that sound poetry seems in tune with the cultural context of Amsterdam and Belgium hardly means though that such work is any more widely accepted there than it would be in the U.S. All the younger poets we met had a great deal to say about the difficulty of finding forums to publish or perform their most inventive work. Meersman, for instance, asserted that he wasn’t aware of a single poetry publication that would publish a poem in six languages. Are there maybe a few poetry publications that might prove his assertion wrong? Possibly, I told him, but I couldn’t say for sure. And interestingly enough, in one of those sudden role reversals that happen often enough in the world of poetry, one of the most successful young poets in Ghent, Lies Van Gasse, whose book I saw for sale in Amsterdam, didn’t read any poems. She said she didn’t think she could perform them well in a context so devoted to highlighting performance. Shyness in a writer, I suppose, has a difficult time when surrounded by boisterous sound poets.

I met many other poets on the trip, with whom I had many fascinating conversations, and I’m sure I’ll blog more about them later. For now, though, it’s safe to say that the sound poem portion of my trip was one from which I learned a lot. It was a pleasure, for awhile, to be in the company of innovative poets and performers for whom the all-too-commonly mentioned camps and theories of U.S. poetry were not the heart of the matter and also somehow transformed.


For further accounts of this trip, see Lorraine's blog Spooks by Me:

Paris portion of trip
Ghent portion of trip
Amsterdam portion of trip

And for some further related material:

http://www.archive.org/details/ahrart001aArtronicAnthologyVolume1Part1

http://www.nokturno.org/philip-meersman/sound-poems/

http://www.aslongasittakes.org/issue%203.html#MEERSMAN

European Trip: Work Received

(Ghent photos courtesy of Helen White)



Books, Chapbooks and Pamphlets:

Rozalie Hirs, het komt voor

Cralan Kelder, French Pastry
night falls and is slow to get up
Lemon Red

Mark Lamoureaux, Astrometry Orgonon

Martyn Last, Concealingly Revealed

Nicholas Manning, Novaless

Eliza Newmann-Saul, Excess
The Precarious State #1: Everything is Equally Familiar

Michelle Noteboom, The Chia Letters
Edging
Uncaged

Xavier Roelens, er is een spookrijder gesignaleerd

Joe Ross, Strata

Vincent Tholomé, People

Andrew Zawacki, Petals of Zero Petals of One



Magazines:

Kluger Hans 1
Kluger Hans 2

Versal 5
Versal 6
Versal 7


CDs:

Jaap Blonk, Paul Pallesen, Bart van der Putten, Off Shore
Jaap Blonk and Maja Kjelstrup Ratkje, improv isors

Rozalie Hirs, Platonic ID
Rozalie Hirs and Stevko Busch, Woordmuziek

Also, check out these online recordings by Samuel Vriezen:

http://www.xs4all.nl/~sqv/

Readings in Europe

In Paris:

IVY WRITERS PRESENTS
An end-of-the season special all-English language reading
with authors Mark Wallace & K. Lorraine Graham
Tuesday, July 7 7:30 p.m.
At : Le Next
17 rue Tiquetonne 75002 Paris
M̊ Etienne Marcel / RER Les Halles
Gratuit! Free!
(+infos sur le blog: http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.com/)


In Ghent:

Friday, July 10
K. Lorraine Graham and Mark Wallace
Galerie Link
Blekersdijk 39
9000 Gent
tel. +32 9 223 59 42
galerielink@skynet.be
Hosted by: KRI KRI


BIOS/BIBLIOS:

Mark Wallace is the author of a number of books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and criticism. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. He is the author of a multi-genre work, Haze, and a novel, Dead Carnival. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, and along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press), a collection of 26 essays by different writers. Most recently he has published a collection of tales, Walking Dreams, and a book of poems, Felonies of Illusion.


K. Lorraine Graham is a writer and visual artist. Graham is the author of Terminal Humming (Edge Books, 2009), as well as the recording Moving Walkways (Narrowhouse Recordings, 2006) and numerous chapbooks, including And so for you there is no heartbreak (Dusie Kollektiv, 2008), Diverse Speculations Descending Therefrom (Dusie Kollektiv, 2007), See It Everywhere (Big Game Books, 2006), Terminal Humming (Slack Buddha Press, 2004), Dear [Blank] I Believe in Other Worlds (Phylum Press, 2003) and It Does Not Go Back (Subpoetics Self-Publish or Perish, 2002). Large Waves to Large Obstacles is forthcoming from Take Home Project. Other work has appeared or is forthcoming in reviews such as Traffic, Area Sneaks, and Foursquare.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Other events and readings may still be scheduled, so be on the lookout for updates.


Over the next few weeks, I’ll be checking e-mail only occasionally, but I’ll put through any comments when I can, and I'll be back in California in late July. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the summer.

Terminal Humming

Terminal Humming
K. Lorraine Graham

ISBN: 978-1-890331-31-5

96 pgs, Cover by the author
2009


regularly $16.00

$12 direct from Edge Books, postpaid.


Click here for an interview with the author at Elisa Gabbert's insightful and entertaining blog.


Click here for earlier versions of some of the work that now appears in Terminal Humming.


For reasons that should be obvious enough, I’m a big fan of this writer and this book. I think people should buy and read Terminal Humming, especially people interested in challenging new writing. It’s energetic, original, perceptive, sensitive, and tough. I’m going on the assumption that my praise of it will be taken as an obviously biased given, so I thought what I’d do instead was to bring up a few ideas that this book makes me think about.

I’ve finally concluded that there is indeed an approach to literature that might be called DC School, although it’s still a little difficult for me to describe all its features. It doesn’t highlight theory/poetics quite to the degree of language poetry, nor is it as closely wedded to style as New York School writing. It has a lot to do with the city of Washington, urban, international, informed, uptight, backwards, bourgeois. Where politics is a matter of daily life, an ordinary, all-too-human business, the thing people talk about so much it feels like you never want to hear about it again. It’s a city of riots, where rich and poor, white and non-white people mix uneasily. Where the best bars always close and the ones that survive always deeply suck but the poets go to them anyway. Where the city government is bankrupt and the other government is morally bankrupt.

Edge Books is, without doubt, the home base of DC experimental poetry, even as it also publishes writers from other places and contexts—Kevin Davies, Jennifer Moxley, Anselm Berrigan, Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, Tom Raworth among them—some of whom share more in common with DC poetry than others. DC, on Edge Books or otherwise, and whether in the past or now, is particularly a central location for some of the most energetic and challenging women poets working today: Joan Retallack, Tina Darragh, Beth Baruch Joselow, Heather Fuller, Cathy Eisenhower, Leslie Bumstead, Jean Donnelly, Mel Nichols, to name only a few who live or have lived there and have certainly written with the idea of DC as a place.

Because I no longer live there, I think I can see more clearly some things that mark contemporary DC poetry, the experimental wing of it especially. A fractured, off-kilter lyricism, a concern with both the international and the daily, an almost pathologically anti-naive skepticism, a humor (whether deadpan or high-pitched) inseparable from the desire to strangle, an insistence on politics as constant fact, one with an often hyper-awareness of how language functions as part of its sense of the daily and full of a bitterly ironic recognition of how facts become the poker chips of diplomacy. Where diplomacy and the breakdown of diplomacy are essential metaphors, and taking sides is rarely more than the first and easiest move. Structurally, it’s probably a genuinely hybrid experimental poetry, one not recognized as such by any of the usual taxonomies and power players. Narrative and anti-narrative, documentary and anti-documentary, lyrical and splintered. It’s about buildings, corridors, faucets, loneliness and love and the stink of knowing that your major export may be death. It’s about how locality and displacement are part of the same larger global processes and there’s no home to hunker down in.

Somehow, the city whose experimental writing most resembles that of DC is Vancouver. Anybody who can explain that to me please step forward.

The first long sequence in Terminal Humming, “If This Isn’t An Interview I Don’t Know What to Say,” presents the world of DC international think thank politics and office life through the lense of a knowing but desperate alienation, the voice of a writer who can be neither an insider or an outsider to what’s going on but has to work there anyway.

Here’s a list of places, supplied by the author, where K. Lorraine Graham has lived: Carlsbad California, Washington DC, Harbin (Peoples Republic of China: PRC), Singapore, Beijing, Sedgwick Maine, Guangzhou PRC, Mexico City, New Zealand, Tabubil (Papua New Guinea), San Jose California, La Serena (Chile), somewhere in Minnesota she can longer name, Norfolk, VA.

The places where she’s worked—national and international political think tanks, corporate export companies, art schools, foreign language schools, and lots of others—would need an even longer list.

Terminal Humming is also about sexual longing and sexual violence and the often schizophrenic pathologies of gender. It’s about putting yourself out there, being on the make and being made. It’s about a young woman in a world where monitoring the exchange of high-powered international weapons is Happy Hour post-work boy talk that leads to awkward attempts at love, while every apartment building has its share of lunatics and drunks who feel that the whole world is watching.

I find the book funny and startling and nasty and more than a little creepy. At times, visually and because of what it says, it seems like it’s going to spin off the page. I also think it fits quite well with most of the definitions of the gurlesque that I’ve seen floating around. If this book is an indication, DC has as much room for female gothic as any Ann Radcliffe castle.

These are poems that bring back, for me, a time and place where I no longer live while at the same time they remain absolutely contemporary. I remember when I first heard some of them and who was there. I can’t go back to those times and places. They aren’t there. Quite a few of the people aren’t either. DC is a place where a lot of people leave, even those of us who are from there. I can’t read these poems without thinking about all that. You can though.

If you’ve seen K. Lorraine Graham’s work around, and more and more of it is getting around, you’ll be surprised to find how much of it isn’t in this book. But this long overdue first full-length collection doesn’t feel skimpy for those who already know her work and it’s a more than significant chunk of it for those who don’t.

There’s no reason to believe me about any of this, obviously. I’m sure you're more than capable of deciding whether you want to find out for yourself.