Books Reviews, 5 AM, Twitter, Summertime
I have a new book review up at The Rumpus, where I compare Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 And Kill a Girl to Twin Peaks, Momento, and Sixth Sense. It’s one of my favorite books of 2010 so far!
It is finally feeling like summer here. Wednesday we drove an hour and a half to walk on the beach and the wind was so hard and cold it blew sand into my teeth and hair but the water was so blue, the sky was cloudless. We lost twenty degrees driving out to San Francisco, what seemed like dramatically too-warm clothing at home felt too skimpy near the water. We went to the San Francisco Zoo at the Golden Gate park, the zoo is shabby and not updated except for the fantastic meerkat-and-prairie-dog exhibit which is open to the sky and has wonderful heated rocks all around. Still, though it was a sad zoo, otters showed off every time I walk by, as river otters do. The most beautiful otters. I still miss being able to go out and see otters every day on the dock at my Port Townsend beach.
For a long time I resisted twitter. Now I have an account and you can follow me there if you look me up under “Jeannine Hall Gailey” or find me @webbish6. Later I will tell the story of how twitter helped me find and fall in love with my new publisher. I actually signed up to “follow” a bunch of my favorite poetry book publishers!
My heart still hasn’t slowed down from the time I got the news about my book. I don’t think it will settle down until the book is in my hands, until then, I’ll just be a skitter mass of nerves. All things to get in order: blurbs, cover art, maybe a new author photo. I have to proofread, proofread, proofread. I’m changing order, adding new poems, deleting lines from old poems, reshaping the MS. You think it’s finished, then you realize you weren’t.
A shout out to the lit mag 5 AM as I am always pleased with the reading experience whenever I am lucky enough to get a contributor copy – the magazine falls towards the quirky and funny, along with the occasionally heartbreaking, so I guess maybe my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [circuits]” fits in alongside the “quirky” in Issue 31 with other poets such as Marge Piercy, Michael S. Harper, Charles Harper Webb, and Denise Duhamel. Buy it! Read it!
Some notes:
Friday I’m doing a talk at the local library (an august old building in Port Townsend) for the “youth writing group” on comic books, poetry, and persona. Good times! I’m really looking forward to it. It turns out I really like working with high school kids.
Today I was really excited to get contributor copies of the Spring 2008 5 AM. 5 AM is always compulsively readable and I am honored to be a part of it. The poem in there is completely autobiographical, which is a rarity for me. I’m kind of happy it’s not online, because it’s so personal, but the poem also fits in well tone and subject-matter-wise with the rest of the issue, which means some editors are working hard to make that happen!
Steel Toe Books announces two new books chosen from June’s open submissions: http://www.wku.edu/~tom.hunley/steeltoebooks/news.htm
The choreography on So You Think You Can Dance this season is so lame compared to the last two seasons. no? Still my favorite summertime show. I So Wish I Could Dance. That’s my version.
Hmm, after a string of rejections over the past few months (always heartening) I finally got two acceptances in the mail on one day!
5 AM took a poem I really like, and one of my poems was a semifinalist for the Rattle poetry prize, so they’re going to publish that one.
And, on my trail walk, I saw two baby bunnies! A banner day all around. Except for the physical therapy and blood test appointments. Not as fun. But, you’ve got to take a little bad with the good.
I’m starting to get ready for my two-week trip to U of Akron, SUNY Fredonia, and Hall/Gailey family-homestead Cincinnati. What to pack? My mom said “well, it’s 70 today, and tomorrow supposed to be around 41 degrees.” Layers?
Update:
Questions: Looking for a new journal to send to. Ideally, it would be a place friendly to persona poems, prose poems, the quirky, the funny, sonnets with X-men references, etc…Please post your suggestions to the comments field.
More rejections: in order to balance out the universe, a rejection of a query from Copper Canyon (though these are lovely poems, we’re full right now, etc…but it was handwritten – that was nice!) and a rejection from BOA with a nice note. Then two e-mail rejections. Total number of acceptances yesterday and today: 2. Total number of rejections: 4.
Oh, the velocity of poems!
