Posts tagged ‘corey mesler’
The Sky Needs More Work
Released 31 July 2014. |
With poems like “Strictly Blowjob” and “The Cancer of Believing You’re in Control,” acclaimed writer Corey Mesler has made a book that adjoins sex, love and social connection in their many manifestations, from meditations on The Beatles, death, pharmacology, and infidelity, to “the holycow feeling/of just being human and/satisfied like a goddamn poem.”
From The Sky Needs More Work:
Cicisbeo
She drove me to a playground
behind a church.There underneath the rocking
swings she satastride me, taking my root
roughly into herbody like a philter. I bucked
against her, theground was hard and cold.
Later she would be too.But, for a while, illicitly she
carried me around likea stone. She was in love with
my smile, my talk,my ability to not be her husband.
Poems from the book available online:
These links all open in a new window.
- “1728 Dashes Equal a Gallon,” Anomalous
- “A Man Walking,” Arabesques
- “At the Mapco,” White Shoe Irregular
- “The Beatles in Five Parts,” Words Dance
- “The Body Opens like a Flame,” “The Corollary of the New Book,” “Starring Erica Rhodes” and “Bunuel’s Car,” Blue Lake Review
- “Chronogram,” Unlikely Stories
- “Fever,” Thoughtsmith
- “Home at this Point,” with other poems, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature
- “In My Dreams Rebecca Hall,” with other poems, The Legendary
- “Lastly Through a Hogshead of Real Fire,” with another poem, Thieves Jargon
- “Pale and Drift,” with other poems, Pig in a Poke
- “Strictly Blowjob,” with other poems, Poetry Super Highway
- “The Way of Sleep,” Thoughtsmith
Reviews of The Sky Needs More Work:
In “The Last Poem,” we are once again in dialogue with the same universal editor as in “Dear Editor,” and while the self-effacing tone still lingers, there is an element of hope in the newfound desire of the speaker to get his words, those turbulent ghosts, published. “The End of the Year of Darkness” sums it up best: “What is/lost is lost” and “What I create is good,” and what Mesler managed to create in these 88 pages is beyond good.
—A.J. Huffman, “The Sky Needs More Work by Corey Mesler,” REviews, Summer 2014.
If you are a lover of human experience, I highly recommend this book of poetry!
—Sharra Rosichan, “Book Review: The Sky Needs More Work by Corey Mesler,” Odds and Ends, 27 August 2014.
…the subject matter is dripping with delicious verbal concoctions… This book is not to be missed.
—Susan Cushman, “Writing on Wednesday: The holycow feeling of just being human. Or today we burn clouds.,” Pen & Palette, 23 July 2014
Mesler’s is again a poetry manifesting, indeed, sustaining—the Memphis school. Wm. Carlos Williams and numerous others would find it substantial and elucidating of the all the contraries to the idealized lumpen life. The bottom falls away from it, the foundations, the bases, and one is put on notices to be aware of what lives live within the one we live. Merely by seeing in language. A poetry that does not need explaining, abjures it explicitly.
—Gordon Osing, author of Theaters of Skin, and La Belle Dame
Critical Praise for Corey Mesler:
Corey Mesler is that rarest of things: a truly fun, literary writer.
—C. L. Bledsoe, “The Lit Report,” Prick of the Spindle, September 2013
Mesler repeatedly examines the flip-side of the coins laid over the eyes of pain and find laughter.
—Steve Stern, author of the Jewish Book Award-winning, The Wedding Jester, praising The Catastrophe of my Personality
Mesler’s poems bear a family resemblance to the excellent poetry of Kay Ryan and Tim Suermondt but chances are you have not read poems exactly like his. Inimitable, sometimes surreal or synthetic (joining the possible with the impossible), never illogical but willing to take brave leaps, his poems are as individual as he is, original, engaging, goofy, and smart as blazes.
—Kelly Cherry, author of The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems, praising The Catastrophe of my Personality
Not also but especially in the briefest, the tenderest of moments, when one is possessed by intimacy with his own life, there is no more crowding an enemy than human time. The radicality (I know, there’s no such word) of Corey Mesler’s poetry is its presentation of the terrific values in pieces of being, in protracted moments of verbal attention, in images that make even the awful and perilous things we know—enlightening.
—Gordon Osing, author of Things that Never Happened, praising Our Locust Years
31 July 2014
Corey Mesler
Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He has published five novels, Talk: A Novel in Dialogue (2002), We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon (2006), The Ballad of the Two Tom Moores (2010), Following Richard Brautigan (2010), and Gardner Remembers (2011), three full length poetry collections, Some Identity Problems (2008), Before the Great Troubling (2011), and The Sky Needs More Work, and three books of short stories, Listen: 29 Short Conversations (2009), Notes toward the Story and Other Stories (2011) and I’ll Give You Something to Cry About (2011). He has also published a dozen chapbooks of both poetry and prose. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize numerous times, and two of his poems have been chosen for Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac. With his wife, he runs Burke’s Book Store in Memphis TN, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores. He can be found at coreymesler.wordpress.com.
Books for Upper Rubber Boot:
The Sky Needs More Work: poems by Corey Mesler, released 31 July 2014.
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With poems like “Strictly Blowjob” and “The Cancer of Believing You’re in Control,” acclaimed writer Corey Mesler has made a book that adjoins sex, love and social connection in their many manifestations, from meditations on The Beatles, death, pharmacology, and infidelity, to “the holycow feeling/of just being human and/satisfied like a goddamn poem.”
31 July 2014
Contributor & Book News, & Review Round-up
Lots of great reading from, and news for, Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days contributors:
- Paolo Bacigalupi‘s new novel The Water Knife, will be “about a water war between Phoenix and Las Vegas.”
- Kelly Link‘s Magic for Beginners was Flavorwire’s Book of the Week at the beginning of July.
- Chet Weise co-edited and appears in Language Lessons: Volume 1, released on Jack White’s Third Man, and including work from other Apocalypse Now alums Brian Barker, Pinckney Benedict, Nicky Beer, Andrew McFadyen Ketchum and Wayne Miller as well as two poems by URB editor Joanne Merriam.
- E. Lily Yu‘s “The Urashima Effect” was reviewed at Marooned Off Vesta.
And for 140 And Counting contributors:
- Berit Ellingsen‘s short story “Dancing on the Red Planet” is in the newly released The Apex Book of World SF 3. Her “Grains of Sand” appears in the winter edition of Blue Fifth Review.
- Simon Kewin‘s short story “Eighteen Million Butterflies” came out last month in Lakeside Circus.
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- Simon Sylvester‘s flash fiction piece, “Charlie Loved the Circus,” is up at The List, which also reviewed his The Visitors.
- Charles Trumbull has a piece about haiku in, unusually, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Lyn Lifshin, whose persona poetry collection Marilyn Monroe: Poems we published back in December, has a new poetry collection out with Texas Review Press entitled Secretariat: The Red Freak, The Miracle.
Corey Mesler‘s The Sky Needs More Work will be released on Thursday, and is already available for pre-order at Kobo! Here’s a sample:
Mesler’s book was recently reviewed by Susan Cushman at Pen & Palette, who wrote, in part, “…the subject matter is dripping with delicious verbal concoctions… This book is not to be missed.”
Speaking of reviews, Upper Rubber Boot titles are getting some great reader reviews!
Bicycle Girl is not for the faint-hearted, as it includes some brutal scenes of interrogation, but this is a fascinating depiction of an all-too-credible future played out in a convincing (and refreshingly non-standard) setting.
—Amazon.co.uk reader VikingS, on Tade Thompson’s “Bicycle Girl“
Best 99 cents I’ve spent in a long time. …It left me with the feeling that my brain had just been set afire (in a good way).
—Amazon.com reader Barbara A. Varacalli, on David M. Harris’ “Changing the World“
This was a lovely, quick read with some powerful imagery!
—Amazon.com reader Colleen B., on Shira Lipkin’s “The Selves We Leave Behind“
1 comment 28 July 2014