You Can Now Pre-order A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY! Plus, a sneak peek!
That’s right, folks. It’s time to put your money where my book is. I mean, if you want to and all.
A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY is coming in October — October 17! — but the lovely folks at Finishing Line Press are taking pre-orders now! Super super exciting.
Finishing Line Press, October 2014.
It’s been wild for me to have two chapbooks on the way. And so soon after A GUIDE FOR THE PRACTICAL ABDUCTEE arrived, I have the official release date for A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY. I’ve never been such a busy little promotion machine. Well, not in a while, anyway.
Anyway, my readers and friends and family have been so supportive. And, you know, I keep saying HEY YOU CAN BUY THIS THING I MADE. And then I get tweets saying HEY I GOT YOUR BOOK. And it’s overwhelmingly lovely. So. I thought I’d share a little sneak peak of A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY. Because, you know, maybe you want to see a snippet of what it looks like before putting your money where my book is. And, also, because I like you.
Anyway, as you may have heard, A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY is a chapbook of 30 erasure poems created using A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD by Jennifer Egan as the source text. There’s an author’s note in the book that elaborates on my process. But you know what’s even better than that? Something I can show you. Ta da!
So this is how my poem “One Night Near Laughing” started:
For each poem in A JAB OF DEEP URGENCY, I used a page that I’d photo copied from the book. (I put Post-It tabs on the pages I thought would be good for finding poems while I was reading it.) I know some others participating in the Pulitzer Remix project — which sparked this manuscript — actually wrote in their books, but I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Anyway, I went through and circled words and phrases I liked, and used those as a starting point when I started scribbling lines for the poem in the margins. The way I do erasure, I only change punctuation and capitalization. The words in the poems I wrote all appear in the same order that they did in the text. It was a challenge. I loved it. This is the final draft of the poem that came from the above page:
“One Night Near Laughing”
Around the fire his eyes
graze ethnographic enclaves –
insomniac ranting about mad hatters,
a contextually induced locus of greed.
Behind her, the sun is setting.
There aren’t many trees.
Amusement is a soundtrack –
stratospheric fame, bird watching,
flirts with no structural reason.
Knocked back, he swears,
words lost out his open window.
There you go! I hope you enjoyed the little sneak peek. And I hope that you liked it enough that you want to see it’s 29 compatriots. Either way, thanks so much for all the support. A writer is nothing without her readers.
