Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
"[Saul] Bellow went on to say something I like to propose to folks put off by political poems: 'I could write a better book from Lolita's point of view.' (Oh, if only Bellow had written that book!) Write a poem from [the Black tennis star's] point of view. Write a poem, write a novel in the voice of Mark Twain's Jim. Or in the voice of one of Charles Bukowski's girlfriends."
~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes
"My coming-of-age story begins unheroically with me on a college bunk reading [Etheridge Knight's] 'The Idea of Ancestry' in a literature textbook.' It may be that poets coming of age staring across space as the speaker does in that poem. I read the poet's biography: a black man from Mississippi, a prisoner who became a poet. I didn't know anything then about 'constructed speakers' in poems; I believed the 'I' of the poem was Etheridge Knight. I recognized him."
~~ from To Float in the Space Between by Terrance Hayes
"I went outside, sat on the steps, and fired up a Marlboro from the pack I'd bought from the machine near the front door. I was through for the day. I'd had my fill of defeat. But the late spring afternoon was sublime. I watched two sleek ravens on the asphalt a few feet away as they tore apart the flattened carcass of a dead squirrel. The thoroughfares were glutted with cars and trucks and buses going who knows where. It came to me at that moment that one day I'd have to skip town myself. Where I'd go. I didn't know, but it would have to be far away. It wasn't working out for me in this outhouse of a city, and my gut told me it never would."
"The radio clicks on—it's poor swollen America, / Up already and busy selling the exhausting obligation / Of happiness while intermittently debating whether or not / A man who kills fifty people in five minutes / With an automatic weapon he has bought for the purpose / Is mentally ill. Or a terrorist. Of if terrorists / Are mentally ill."
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| Conor and Mai's Loser I and Loser II with newbie Deadbeat Poets Society's Volume I: Maximiliano Guzmán. L.U.S.K.'s novelist-in-residence has placed short pieces in each of these. |
"The clapping sound is the new crew boss / keeping time. Jane Kenyon, cancer at forty-seven. / Larry Levis, heart at forty-nine. Ray Carver / who had met Tess and beat alcohol which / was going to kill him, cancer at fifty."
~~ from "Harvest: Those Who Die Early in the Middle Years" included in Summer Snow by Robert Hass
Enjoy the sun with a novel or two unless an eclectic mix of poetry and fiction suits you.
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| This is not the signed copy linked to above. |
