Blurb/blubber

So poet/publisher kevin mcpherson eckhoff has blurbed me again.

Last time, it was in service of Kalamalka Press' How to Make a Collage chapbook, which won their John Lent Poetry Prose Contest. Kevin is Kalamalka's Editor-in-Chief, an English prof at Okanagan College, and a cheeky/intelligent/kind poet/person.

As much as I love winning things, the best part of the whole experience was getting to know Kevin and Jake Kennedy and Jason Dewinetz and Laisha Rosnau and John Lent a bit better.

So when it was time to wrangle blurbers for the new collection, I knew I wanted Kevin. Because he's a hard-working peer and someone whose poetry is very different from mine. And so I really appreciate his support of my work. And I like that he was excited to be asked.

So here's the blurb, which should be in Palimpsest's section of the LCP spring 2014 catalogue:

"Ariel Gordon’s Stowaways is a scrapbook of tender snapshots and snappy comebacks, of fairytale hopes and roadkill truths. This collage of poetry carbonates my alive blood with the oh! of words and the ha! of hearts. A wet, necessary, beautiful, gluey mess of memory, putrefaction, and dreams!" - kevin mcpherson eckhoff
 
I find writing blurbs even more torturous than writing short short reviews. My problem is that I mistrust superlatives. I want the blurbs to tell people about the work instead of just saying "it's magnificent genius!" over and over.

There are one or two more blurbs coming, but I don't want to pluck my proverbial chickens before they've reached the feather-plucking-station. At the poetry abattoir.

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In other news, the title of the collection has officially changed from the working-title How to Pack Without Overpacking to the final-final Stowaways.

It took forever to settle on a final-final. I asked every goddamn writer I knew to help me. And then Palimpsest poet/publisher Dawn Kresan suggested Stowaways, which is the title of one of the poems.

I like it thematically and also because even though it's a one-word title, it's very firmly a two-syllable word. It's a gorgeous goddamn word, too, with all those Ws. It almost falls apart when you say it more than once or twice.

The only other thing I'm working on, Stowaways-wise, is trying to get a few excerpts published in lit mags. YOU HEAR ME, EDITORS OF LITERARY MAGAZINES?!

Ahem.