Thursday, February 07, 2013

blurbage

I got a blurb this week from Kevin McPherson, Kalamalka Press' Editor-in-Chief for my John Lent Poetry-Prose Award-winning chapbook.

I have been blurbed exactly twice. Once by poet/publisher Jenna Butler for my 2009 chapbook with her Rubicon Press and once by Robert Kroetsch. (I'm still over the mooooon that Kroetsch had occasion to read my goddamn poems...)

I wrote the blurb for my chapbook The navel gaze, which was re-used for Hump, given that it ATE The navel gaze.

So this is blurb number three. I'm glad that it's from Kevin, who's another good example of a poet/publisher. (Jenna Butler is one, as is Dawn Kresan at Palimpsest...)

Here goes: 

"Ariel Gordon’s How to Make a Collage offers a scrapbook of extraordinary everydayness. Its poems decoupage tender snapshots beside snappy comebacks. Fairy tale moments foment against ailing skin. Sly instructions for loving smash into slovenly destructions of living. A beautiful, gluey mess of memory, decay, and dreams!"

Sometimes my whole life feels like a "beautiful, gluey mess." And so this feels right. Not too superlative but excessive/necessary in a way that is exclusively Kevin's. And maybe mine, too...

In other news, Kevin also let me know that Jason Denewitz and the students in the Diploma in Writing & Publishing at Okanagan College are currently hard at work hand-setting the chapbook in metal type.

They've promised to take/post pictures of this process, which I'm greatly looking forward to...

2 comments:

Brenda Schmidt said...

Nice! Looking forward to it!

Ariel Gordon said...

Apparently there's something elaborate planned for the cover.