Juliet Cook's Blog, page 108

NEW in Riot Felice - FIVE of my poems!!!!!

"When my computer crashed, I thought I had lost so many details of myself
or at least seven years worth of me
stored on the computer he had bought me
and let me keep when our relationship died.When my hard drive was restored, I found out I hadn’t lost
his rampant collection of hardcore porn videos
including woman after woman sucking dog dick."

(from my poem "Abuse")***I have 5 poems up at riot felice!

"Dark Purple Spread Shot", "Abuse", "Falling", "Root Rot" and "Dancing By Myself"!

 Lots of other poem-y stuff too!HERE - https://riotfelice.com/2017/01/12/juliet-cook-poems/

NEW Rabbit thoughts in TL; DR!

Excited to have Three rabbit thoughts in TL;DR! -
http://www.tldrmagazine.com/single-post/2017/01/09/Three-rabbit-thoughts-Juliet-Cook
"I find a female artist's visual interpretation of malformed
mutant female human doll bodies oddly uplifting, but 
a male artist so focused on twisting and contorting female
body parts into mutant shapes makes me wonder what the
hell that male thinks about real life female bodies. Does he
look at two real women standing next to each other and
think about cutting off both of their upper torsos and heads
and sewing a leg with a hole on top another leg with a hole?"

More HERE - http://www.tldrmagazine.com/single-po... - http://www.tldrmagazine.com/single-post/2017/01/09/Three-rabbit-thoughts-Juliet-Cook

NEW Winter 2017 Edition of Menacing Hedge, including three of my poems!

Very darkly deliciously delighted and excited to have three of my poems included within the NEW Winter 2017 Edition of Menacing Hedge! The fabulous cover art for this issue was created by Susan Yount.Thank you for the creative powers of Kelly Boyker Guillemette, Gio Guillemette, Amanda Gowin, Kiara McMorris, and Menacing Hedge.
The issue - http://www.menacinghedge.com/?edition=winter2017

My poems - http://www.menacinghedge.com/winter2017/entry-cook.php

***
I was black circlesand dark painted nails.I kept my rough drafts concealed,even though they outnumbered the polished lines.I secretly admired her raw exposures, 
her giggling glimmers, her fluttering fingers,
the pages of works in progress, 
ripped out fast, splayed all over the room.

(a small sampling from my poem, "Pumpkin Gut Grave") 

Seven Year Anniversary

Today is the seven year anniversary of me having an unexpected carotid artery dissection, which led to an aneurysm, which caused a stroke, which caused significant brain damage.I had to undergo a risky surgery that involved having a stent inserted into my upper neck so that I didn't bleed to death.I had to re-learn the alphabet, my family member's names, my friend's names.I had to re-learn to read via children's books.For a while, I felt very nervous that I might not be able to write poetry anymore, even though poetry had been my primary passion in life for years. Sometimes my own poetry doesn't make sense to other people, but for a while it didn't even make sense to me!Fortunately, I think it was my genuine passion for words and writing and individualistic communication and creative expression and poetry that had a powerful impact on my recovery. I'm pretty sure anyone who met me these days would have no idea that I had underwent such serious brain damage.I still have issues with some easy words, but since I'm a word-based person, I've gotten pretty good at replacing those words with other words. Actually, I think it's pretty interesting that the words I have the most trouble with are the easy basic words, but I'm fine with uneasy unusual big words.

Also, sometimes I can't think of a word, but I can think of its first letter and VISUALIZE the words length. However my brain healed itself from its neurological damage, I'm now more visual than I used to be.

The stroke didn't change my overall personality, but I do feel it made me more mentally prone to separating the genuinely REAL from the FAKE when it comes to friendship, relationships, and love.

***

Little update: The last paragraph above could probably be interpreted (or possibly misinterpreted) in different ways, in part since I got tried while writing it and lost the energy to elaborate, but I can say it wasn't directed at any one person, situation or relationship.

It was directed at various different kinds of relationships in general.

And sometimes it's hard for me to understand what "friendship" or "love" means to other people, because it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

And I think all of those things are fine, as long as they're genuine. ***

"Post-Stroke my words are not over-
ly obvious. Why on earth should my
non overly obvious poetry be dead?

1. Telebloodied brain cadaver with pernicious red limp.
2. Telebloodied drain dagger with growing open limbs.

3. My carotid swirling, awaited a dangerous blow torch
from the crotch; clicked in, rose up, added platinum mesh
deep inside my odd head. In spite of my almost annihilation.

4. A vicious new voice will slowly seep out of my skull.
5. Will spill more pretty crooked plucked out wordage."

***

the first poem from the first tiny little poetry chapbook I created after my stroke:
https://www.etsy.com/listing/69547229/post-stroke-by-juliet-cook?ref=shop_home_active_16

Flesh-tearing shark shaped snarks

Maybe I sometimes phrase things wrong by saying I don't give a fuck about scenes (in regards to poetry/art).Sometimes I have little word issues and question my own words and wonder what certain basic words even mean and maybe "scene" wasn't the right word to express my discomfort, because all a "scene" really means is a place or an acting sequence, I guess, and "place" is so broad scale and the type of "scenes" I was thinking of are small.My mind seems to associate scenes with small group trends and that sort of thing.I'm not particularly interested in the latest trends, but I am interested in poetry community.I don't disrespect or discredit the desire for community; in fact, I think that poetry/art communities can be very necessary and very positive. I guess I just don't think that my interest causes me to fit into any one particular scene; but maybe it does if the scene is POETRY.I do enjoy being around people with similar interests, or at least communicating with people with similar interests.What I don't enjoy, don't respect, and don't understand the positive points of are the sort of scenes or groups or communities (or whatever you call them) that seem like popularity contests.Like they're competing against each other and want to bash others down.Like they get off by lashing out at others, carelessly picking on others, and creating their own mean non-mainstream cheerleader squad routine.I've seen/heard poets bitch about other poets, have little snark-fests about other poets, and so forth.Those are the kinds of scenes I dislike. The scenes that create their own narrow groups who pretend to be diverse when they're stabbing other people behind their backs.The communities filled with a small infestation of snark-festing, as if they get off by cutting others down and trying to drown them, like flesh-tearing shark shaped snarks patrol these waters and can't get enough of others' blood.Poetry in and of itself is non-mainstream, yet some of this non-mainstream community seems to want to fit in to the more mainstream approach grouping themselves into smaller groups and then attacking the other groups.Maybe everything in life is like that and I just notice it more in poetry land, since that's where a lot of my personal attention and energy is directed.When it comes to poetry and art (and other things too), I don't really care whether or not someone has a college degree (or what their degree is in), whether or not they're social or antisocial or somewhere in between, whether or not they consider themselves academic or independent or something different.I don't desire to quickly narrow my poetry friend list down into any particular sort of group.I care about whether or not they're genuinely poetic and whether or not I like their poetry and their personality (although it's also possible for me to like someone's poetry, but find their personality very bothersome - and vice versa).

NEW Poetry Chapbook Review (of "In Their Own Way" by Chella Courington)

My review of the poetry chapbook, "In Their Own Way" by Chella Courington (Crow Hollow Books, 2016), appears within the NEW issue of Arsenic Lobster, HERE - http://arseniclobster.magere.com/index.htmlOf course, you should also read the poetry in this new issue, which includes work by Blood Pudding Press poet Alessandra Bava, and lots of other stuff too.

NEW in Rogue Agent Issue 22 (Happy New Year!)

"My long letters ruin friendships.
It doesn't matter whether they're overly positive
or overly negative or a juxtaposition of both."from my poem "IT DOESN'T MATTER", in the new Issue 22 of Rogue Agent.Happy to start the New Year by having a poem published, surrounded by other poems, inside the new Issue 22 of Rogue Agent.

HERE - http://www.rogueagentjournal.com/jcook-2

NEW in the Rag Queen Periodical - My tendency to feel as if expressing myself is wrong

"My tendency to apologize when I haven't done anything wrongother than accidentally hurting the feelings of someonewho doesn't understand my feelings.
My tendency to feel like a hissing venomous snakewhen the reason I hissed is because my own space was invadedwith mouths that can't stop themselves from approaching me their way.
They don't get me, or they don't see me, or they want to change me,stomp me down into their so-called solidity"
from my poem "My tendency to feel as if expressing myself is wrong" at Rag Queen Periodical

(somehow I missed this when it meant up last week, so I'm posting it this week. Hey, it's still December after all and I'm very excited to be a Rag Queen. I love the image above the poem too, of a little girl and her snake.)More HERE - http://www.ragqueenperiodical.com/single-post/2016/12/21/My-tendency-to-feel-as-if-expressing-myself-is-wrong

Another NEW Review of A Red Witch, Every Which Way!

Another wonderful new review of "A Red Witch, Every Which Way" (the collaborative poetry book by j/j hastain & I , published this year by Hysterical Books), written by Stephanie Kaylor on Goodreads. (I'm not sure how I missed this, because it looked as if I had "liked" the review, but I don't remember reading it until today. Maybe I'm having a mental glitch, but in any case, here's the review):"One side a positive/ healing/fetish violence./One side a negative/stab wound/fantasy/reality./Never ending hemorrhaging hemisphere. Never/ending lavish/light."This collaborative book felt like a haunted house-- disturbing yet deliciously so, a journey one walks into and doesn't want to leave despite the grotesque nature of it all; the internal, the walls, the decay, the macabre and its traces. The interviews at the end were as rich as the poems, breaking down the barrier between process & product as swiftly as they did the same with the bodily & textual."https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31395925-a-red-witch-every-which-way
***The book reviewed is available via Amazon HERE - https://www.amazon.com/Red-Witch-Every-Which-Way/dp/0940821044/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483005994&sr=1-6The book reviewed is also available from Hysterical Books HERE - http://www.hystericalbooks.com/product-page/1a2d7e83-4bef-31d5-09e1-3326ee271c09And it is also available from the Blood Pudding Press shop HERE - https://www.etsy.com/listing/473901408/new-a-red-witch-every-which-way-2016?ref=shop_home_feat_1

A NEW Review of A Red Witch, Every Which Way!

I just got quite excited because I noticed this 5 star review of j/j hastain and I's collaborative poetry book, "A Red Witch, Every Which Way" which appeared via Amazon earlier this month!Meanwhile, I didn't know if anyone was even reading the book, so unexpectedly encountering a review that calls it Weirdly Beautiful (and mentions Frank Stanford!) feels pretty giddily great!Here's the review followed by the Amazon link. Thank you Wayne F. Burke!"A macabre work full of gory details and with a kind of surrealism that makes the reading of it a delightful adventure. "Pond scum will burst/out the eyes/once the eyes have been/revised into a film" (New Superhero), "...Box/elder stability/yearns for torn pages/in a series of open books" (Clawing At the Confessional), "Meniscus pirouettes/into maximus piranhas/chiming within/broken bones" (Conjured Talisman), "thinning/ossein to massage/scrim by which to scry/mutant shrapnel made" (Access Achieved Then Denied).Weirdly beautiful language usage, full of surprises, twists and turns, and wordplay: language adroitly used, as in "Paradoxical Flight": "when a road kill/cat/black/silk cradles a/hyper notch/broken down/purring/crotch panel/rotting neural/blotch/an aural/round path/so partial/pussy extract/carefully oozing/from new particles/networks/jet stream/proving/an either or/model..."Does it make sense to me? Hell, no. Does it matter? Again, no. As someone once said to the late Frank Sanford concerning his work, "I don't understand it, but I know what you mean."These examples I've used should not be construed as representative of a flighty or loose style of writing because this is a disciplined work of serious stature also with an underlying structural design (3 "Acts"). I gather the last part of this statement intuitively and cannot say I have the slightest idea what the structure consists of. And you know what? It does not matter. This is a book to read and reread. A phantasmagorical journey where "Horses run through hoarse/barns. Hemlines narrow their slits." A book that asks such deep questions as "How do we engrave an orifice?" and answers "Coagulate all the swag/down our throats and then/gag ourselves..." Readers--enjoy."https://www.amazon.com/Red-Witch-Every-Which-Way/dp/0940821044/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1483005994&sr=1-6
***The book can also be acquired via the Hysterical Books website HERE - http://www.hystericalbooks.com/product-page/1a2d7e83-4bef-31d5-09e1-3326ee271c09

And via my own Blood Pudding Press shop HERE - https://www.etsy.com/listing/473901408/new-a-red-witch-every-which-way-2016?ref=shop_home_feat_1