Books

Big American Trip
(Shearsman Books, 2009)

Big American Trip assumes the form of postcards addressed to a variety of people and organizations, authored by a lone “alien” of unidentified nationality, ethnicity, and gender. A speaker of many languages and master of none, taking comfort in Terrance McKenna’s belief that “the starships of the future will be syntactical,” the alien travels from the Pacific Northwest to the East Coast as s/he studies Strunk and White and deconstructs the language of road signs, the talk of people in gas stations and rest stop bathrooms, the radioed speeches of the US President and Staff—all the while searching for something (A friend? A job? A home?) and coming up empty. Rather than any one alien perspective—Russian, Italian, Israeli, Mexican, Haitian, Cuban, Cambodian, Senegalese, Bangladeshi, a Berliner lost without a GPS and looking for directions on a Salish Indian Reservation—Big American Trip creates a syntax and a grammar at once common and strange, a hybrid language that might speak to anyone who has ever felt out of place or at odds with the Language of a Nation.

The Nines
(Chapbook. Palm Press, 2006)

Begun in response to Words of Mass Deception used to justify the US invasion and occupation of Iraq, The Nines is a cross-genre series of prose poems / lyric essays derived from appropriated critical, scientific, and instructional texts (dealing with linguistics, Monet, breakdancing, and swine, among other topics).

An act of resistance against narrative’s still-popular stranglehold on meaning-making, an indictment of the privileging of the intellect over the senses, The Nines parody the systems that would have us measure “knowledge and skills such as comprehension, vocabulary . . . geometry, physics, social deconstruction, and the Mayan calendar—only to discover the answer is B) Rod McKuen and Mary Oliver.”

Book 1 of The Nines is available from Small Press Distribution or directly from the Palm Press website.