Summer is over, but I went to the beach today.

1. SPD sold out of my book, so Rod has sent them more!
2. I am impatient for reviews.
   
3. Or, at least, stop telling my friends and my boyfriend what you think of my book and tell me instead.
4. No autumnal clothes for me for a few more months. The best I can do is wear jeans and sometimes a light sweater, but that's pretty much true all year round here.
5. Remembering how funny Dada is: "Dada will kick you in the behind and you will like it." I like the fact that they say "behind" instead of "ass."
6. Jerry is coming all the way from Amherst to visit!
   

Upcoming Readings, Interviews, and other Sundries

1. I'm going to LA this weekend to hear Bruce Andrews and Deborah Meadows read at the Poetic Research Bureau on Friday, and to give a reading with Amaranth Borsuk & Hugh Behm-Steinberg on Saturday. Follow the links for details, and please do come if you're in the LA area.

2. Mark Wallace has put up a post which thinks about Terminal Humming within the context of avant-garde poetry in Washington, DC.

3. Elisa Gabbert has posted an interview that we did earlier this spring--we talk about my book, food, visual poetry, and a few other things, too.

Terminal Humming is now available from Edge Books

Terminal Humming
K. Lorraine Graham

ISBN: 978-1-890331-31-5

96 pgs, Cover by the author
2009


regularly $16.00

$12 direct from Edge Books, postpaid.

All "this shining and this _utter [!]." Terminal Humming is a very exciting book and I love it. Eavesdropping and borrowing from diverse discourses, K. Lorraine Graham has created a complex "essay on scrounging." It is a wonderfully violent "attempt to unleash inner badness" in poems that are hot and audacious, in a girly way: "Wonder Woman boots twirl twirl." Terminal Humming is just the right amount of weird. In it, "kinks become beautiful and obvious," and "language [hums] as angry form." Read this "downwind chess urine bird bathing extravaganza" of a book! NADA GORDON

Map and start K. Lorraine Graham’s Man-cunt. Honeybucket defoliates broadcast. Too personal? She keeps it normal and lumpy. Scattered disco balls mutilated by grisly pixies. This shining and this clutter. Their cunning bodies, well stocked. She rammed her glistening ovipositor into his abdomen. Imbued doll I am not. Warning! Warning! I clash looking for just a regular body in a supergirl outfit. All soft and twisted and inexpensive and consumable with a nice bike and nice bike gear. Hottie wanting sweet inside sprawl (Female until further notice) mixing information substitutes. Automatic shredder joy rehearsing pitch incineration. Squirming again and again (editing) editing (editing) (editing) something (editing) very (editing). Edit looks stupid. Change the finish. Overcome emotion by funding. Written in a kind of stripper life often scattered communication prosthetics mutilated by beauty. You find them here. ABIGAIL CHILD


Using irony, charm, and unexpected associations, the poems of Terminal Humming challenge any sense of women's situation being normal or transparent. These ambitious and invasive poems make us attentive to the steady drone of put-downs and put-ons that form so much of our discourse. Parcels of ostensibly innocuous information reveal their condescension or malice on Graham's pages, drawing us into the contours of an everyday life that is fine, okay enough—yet threatened nonetheless. And yet the poems have the strength of their whimsy, an outraged whimsy which ever-so-casually threatens back. This is the everyday as counter-attack! STAN APPS

I'm not opening any of the birthday packages I've received until it is my birthday

I want to open them now. Now! But I can wait a few more days.

I'm no longer looking at proofs--Terminal Humming is going to print right now, and I should have copies in hand soon, soon. In time for my reading in LA at the Poetic Research Bureau on June 27 at 4pm (more details later).

I'm debating what kind of a birthday cake to make this year. I love carrot cake. I have a recipe for a weird but interesting cake made from buckwheat. I'm drowning in berries, so perhaps I should make something involving those.

I can't bake anything that requires a nonstick pan (the fumes from nonstick coating asphyxiate birds, and they're probably not good for people, either)--but does anyone have cake suggestions?

I'm curious about the origin of the handshake snap.

1. I have a UPS tracking number for the proofs for Terminal Humming. I am doing a bad job not being nervous and excited about it all. Excited is good. Nervous--not so good.

2. It has not been sunny here since Memorial Day weekend. May and June here are the SoCal version of February: people are overwrought because they want it to be summer, they go swimming without wetsuits even though it's 65 degrees and the water is even colder, they drive worse than usual.

3. Being a woman in a microbrewery or bottle-shop is very similar to being a woman at an avant-garde jazz show, although the former is, admittedly, a much more social environment.

4. I'm not a skillfull handshake snapper yet, but I've only just started to get practice. Whenever someone goes in for the handshake snap with me, I kind of want to yell "whitey" at them, or at least have some third observer yell it at the both of us.

Now it's really really forthcoming

Several days of relaxation and etc ruin me, a little. Yesterday while I was hooping on the beach I had a crowd of about 20 people watching me. Someone asked for my card, and if I could be booked at parties. I don't have hooping cards, and I have no idea how much I'd charge for hooping at an event, or how I'd even draw up a contract. There would have to be all sorts of specific clauses detailing that no one could touch me, that I'd have to have a certain amount of space to perform, and that I wouldn't hoop on weird raised platforms, and that were I to accidentally doc someone with my hoop, I wouldn't be liable for any injuries.

But I have other things on my mind--like my book (Terminal Humming, Edge Books), which was sent to the printer yesterday. Proofs by the end of the week, actual book in my hand, and hopefully yours, very soon.

Teacher: "Quick come up with an excuse other than 'I overslept.' "

Student: "Yes."

No more ESL teaching for the next month. I have about 15-20 hours a week of online teaching, as well as a few professional development things I need to do, but that still amounts to significantly less work than normal. I actually really enjoy teaching ESL, but it's also exhausting, so it's nice to take a break from it every six months or so.

I'm going to typeset Terminal Humming and give a copy again to a few folks to look over--at this point, many people have read it and given me advice about the poems and order, but now I need help catching really nitty-gritty things typos and word choice mix ups. Loose/lose, for example is one that I make constantly. Basically, I make the same annoying word choice errors that my students do--that's probably obvious to anyone who reads this blog regularly. I can catch 95% of those errors after very attentive proofreading, but the rest--no chance.