Jennifer Perrine's Blog, page 3

I'm Wearing Fur Pajamas

Michelle Tudor and Peter Barnfather have put together a beautiful new issue of Wildness , including powerful work by writers like Jess X Chen and Claudia D. Hernández, as well as a cover photograph by Anfal Shamsudeen that left me dreaming of galaxies. (My dreams don't tend to get cosmic very often. They're usually of the navigating-an-unfamiliar-city variety, or else involve being at school and discovering that I've forgotten the location of a classroom, the materials I need to teach, or my locker combination. Some anxieties die hard.)

And yes, I've got a poem in the new issue, too. It's the first in a series of poems, all called "Absence Makes." Jeanette Winterson writes about "the nearness of the wound to the gift." For me, the wound is always about absence, and I keep examining its ragged edges, looking for (and trying to make) the gift.

Nothing Is Wasted, Only Reproduced

The fourth annual Bisexual Book Awards were announced earlier this week--yes, there is such a thing--and No Confession, No Mass was named the winner in the poetry category! Although I've taught classes on how books or other texts represent sexuality, it's still sometimes strangely a surprise when my own work does that. It's rare that I've gone into a poem or a story overtly thinking, "Aha! Now it's time to write something really queer!" And yet, queer politics and experience inform everything I do, and it's delightful when other people recognize that.

I'm grateful to Sheela Lambert, who organizes the awards and, as such, gives greater visibility to bisexual writers and books with bisexual themes and characters. And I'm pleased to have my book counted in such good company. This year's other winners are:
The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch
Bisexuality in Education: Erasure, Exclusion and the Absence of Intersectionality by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Call It Wonder: an odyssey of love, sex, spirit, and travel by Kate Evans
Dead Ringer by Heidi Belleau and Sam Schooler
Ariah by B.R. Sanders
Peripheral People by Reesa Herberth and Michelle Moore
Not Otherwise Specified by Hannah Moskowitz
Bound with Honor by Megan Mulry

Congrats to everyone!

She is Like a Cat in the Dark and Then She is the Darkness

The good folks at Pangyrus just published my poem, "Dear Rhiannon." It's part apology, part epistle; part outrageous lie, part true story; part wild imagination, part awful reality. Pangyrus includes a handy compositional note with most of their poems; check out mine if you want to try to sort out which part is which, or if you just want to peer into the writing process.

All those parts and pieces aside, the poem's all dancing, all music, all the time.

No More Will My Green Sea Go Turn a Deeper Blue

On Thursday, June 23, as part of Art Week Des Moines, Nomadic Press is sponsoring A Thousand Words or More, an evening of poetry and song among the paintings and photographs at Moberg Gallery. If you're in the area, stop by for music by Fernando Aveiga and readings by Michaela Mullin, Brian Spears, Maria Ximena Pineda, and yours truly. Or, if the aural isn't as enticing, come for the visual--the current exhibit at Moberg features the work of Benjamin Gardner, John Hull, James Ochs, and Lindy Smith--or the gustatory, in the form of beer and wine. Doors open at 7:00--I hope to see you there!

With Their Tanks and Their Bombs and Their Bombs and Their Guns

For all you fans of The Walking Dead, George Romero films, Thriller, World War Z, or--my personal favorite--Shaun of the Dead, Foiled Crown Books has an anthology for you!

Dead Inside: Poems and Essays on Zombies is hitting the presses in June, and free shipping is available on all pre-orders through the FCB website.

(Yes, I've got a poem in the book, and yes, it does use zombies as a metaphor for sex. Not gross at all. Nope.)

You Are the Ghost Town, and I Am the Heartland

Maybe it's the upcoming move, but I've been thinking a lot about place and how location does or doesn't change my writing. Back before I was a writer, I was a visual artist--or at least, an art student. I drew huge portraits and figure studies, and as my teachers pointed out, the bodies were almost always floating in space. Occasionally, I would paint landscapes; these depicted the way the world looked in the dark of night, when many details that mark a particular geography become more difficult to discern. In art, as in life, I was unmoored--I never lived in one home for more than a few years, and that sense of transience showed up in my work.

I've been living in Iowa just shy of ten years now, and aspects of this place have found their way into poems and stories: the native birds, the rhythms of speech, the vulnerability of vast fields. As I make my peace with leaving for pastures that, if not greener, are certainly more likely to be sheltered by mountains, I am finally recognizing the places here that have mattered to me. In the midst of this, Chris Rice Cooper kindly invited me to represent Iowa in the Sacred Spaces, Sacred Places project, which features the places sacred to over 100 poets, including some of my favorites. (Ellen Bass, Sarah A. Chavez, and Wang Ping are just a few of the many poets who show and write about their sacred spaces.) It's strange to know that I've been called upon to represent a state that still doesn't feel like home, and yet, I've made a home here.

The last month, though, I've hardly been home, flittering from one place to another for different events and festivities. April began with this year's AWP conference in Los Angeles, where I met amazing writers by day and accidentally roamed through Skid Row by night. Highlights of AWP included meeting fiction writer and quoll researcher Amanda Niehaus at the Writer to Writer booth; happily chanting the word queer at a panel on teaching LGBTQ literature; listening to literary all-stars Jennine Capo Crucet, Roxane Gay, Natalie Díaz, and Jess Walter read their beautiful and often astoundingly funny work; and being enthralled by a conversation among Maggie Nelson, Leslie Jamison, and Geoff Dyer. Only at AWP.

I swung back home for a couple of days to teach and to discover the pile of anthologies and journals mounting in my mailbox. (Now that this travel-heavy month is over, I'll finally have time to read Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity, Veils, Halos & Shackles, The Doll Collection, and the new issue of Crazyhorse.) Then, it was off to a conference in Houston to talk about activism and writing with talented folks like Stacey Waite and Brandon Som.

There was a bit of rest for a week or so before I took off for NYC and a reading at Manhattan College. Sadly, I arrived in town just a bit too late to attend the Publishing Triangle's awards ceremony, where No Confession, No Mass won the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry. (I know, I'm burying the lede here, but when I started writing this post, I didn't know that I'd won!)

So, as of today, I am back in Iowa, my travels done--at least, until it's time to move. No doubt this month was hectic, but it was good to be reminded of that untethered feeling. There are no bodies floating in space showing up in my writing--not yet, anyway--but there are references to atlases and maps, to conversations overheard in airports, to flora and fauna that you just can't find in the Midwest. It makes me look forward to the move this summer and to whatever perspectives my new home--my new sacred space--will bring.

And If You Insist On Knowing My Bliss

The Publishing Triangle and the Bi Writers Association each announced their finalists for literary awards this week, and No Confession, No Mass made it onto the shortlists for both the Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Bisexual Book Award for Poetry. It's an honor to have my work recognized along so many other great books: Caprice: Collected, Uncollected, & New Collaborations by Denise Duhamel and Maureen Seaton; Life in a Box is a Pretty Life by Dawn Lundy Martin; Fanny Says by Nickole Brown; and Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha. As always, the shortlists remind me how much brilliant queer literature is out there, and I'm excited to explore the finalist books that I haven't read yet.

And, while I'm on the subject of lists: Thanks to E. Ce Miller for naming No Confession, No Mass as one of the 13 Poetry Collections to Read for National Poetry Month. Anna Moschovakis' They and We Will Get into Trouble for This and Robyn Schiff's A Woman of Property are already on my April reading list, and Ladan Osman's The Kitchen-Dweller's Testimony is one of the best books I've read recently. What are you looking forward to reading this National Poetry Month?

Leave Your Things Behind 'Cause It's All Going Off Without You

In preparation for moving this summer, I've been paring and pruning my collection of books, trying to cull all those tomes I'll never read again (or never read in the first place). I had to psych myself up for this process for weeks. My house--heck, my life--is pretty spartan, but books are the one thing in which I tend to overindulge, and I have a hard time parting with any book, no matter how unlikely I am to pick it up again.

Somehow, though, I managed to let go of about a third of my books, which I donated to the local public library. I didn't have the heart--and the library staff didn't have the energy--to keep track of the count as cart after cart was filled, but we guesstimated there were around five or six hundred books in total.

Among the gems now available to residents of Des Moines:

Reader's Digest: Creative Cooking I have been carrying this book around with me since childhood, when I could sit for hours with it, fascinated by the color illustrations of all the different fish and cuts of meat. (Yes, I was a weird kid.) I have never once cooked anything from this cookbook.

Not one, but two copies of Dune Messiah. Why do I have two? No idea, though I was a huge fan of Dune--both the book and the David Lynch film--when I was a kid. (Fear is the mind-killer, y'all!)

How to Be a TV Quiz Show Millionaire Bought for me by a friend when they found out I was going to appear on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. Did it help? Maybe. But no, I'm not a millionaire, from quiz show proceeds or otherwise.

Selections from my once complete Stephen King collection. Until the mid-90s, I religiously bought every book he wrote. I had an entire bookshelf in my house devoted to those books, but it's time to free up some space and let the local library's lending list grow just a little shorter for Gerald's Game and Christine.

A battered copy of Beowulf from high school. It's yellowed, the pages are falling out, and--twenty years after I acquired this version--I now have better translations. So, this one goes to the bindery and, I hope, someone who will share my fondness for that alliterative epic.

And in case you'd like to scrutinize my entire Smauglike hoard, photos:

Like a Disaster, Like Blown-Out Semi Tires

Lincolnites, Omahans, lend me your ears! I'll be in Nebraska for the Prairie Schooner Book Prize Reading and Celebration on Tuesday, March 1. I'm excited to meet Bryn Chancellor, winner of the fiction prize for When Are You Coming Home?: Stories, as well as all the folks at University of Nebraska Press who did such a bang-up job bringing No Confession, No Mass into the world.

If you're in the area, swing by the Great Plains Art Museum and say hello!

You've Got Style, That's What All the Girls Say

The fine folks over at Sundress Publications featured some poems from No Confession, No Mass last week as part of their "Best Dressed" feature on their blog, The Wardrobe. This has been--and likely will always be--the only time anyone's awarded me that particular superlative.

Thanks, Sundress, for showcasing these poems!
"Invocation: [Saint] Genevieve"
"Embarrassment: from baraço (halter)"
"A Theory of Violence"
"Ode to the Motorcycle"
"Fishwife"