Ben Mirov's "Taco Wolf"

Says poet and small-press darling Ben Mirov in a recent blog post, regarding the image above: "This is probably going to be the cover of my next book."

Incidentally, you can get a copy of Mirov's most recent book, "Ghost Machine" -- the winner of the latest Caketrain chapbook competition and the book I'm currently reading between bouts of chasing my seven-month-old away from the television cords -- here.

Dan Walsh's "Odds of Annoyance"

While doing research recently for a Genre Whore blog post on the existentialist genius that is the website Garfield Minus Garfield, I stumbled upon the blog of the site's creator, Dublin-based artist, musician and writer Dan Walsh.

Among other gems, the blog -- travors.com -- includes the following keen and wonderfully depressing observation, posted Feb. 22 and reprinted here with permission in its entirety. The post is titled, "The odds of annoyance."

"At the age of 34, with some good luck and modern medicine, you could say I'm less than half way through my life. Taking that as a given, let's make a few assumptions:

> I started interacting with other people, through speech and actions, around the age of four.

> That gives me 30 years of interaction with other humans.

> During that time I've met many people and been in many situations. Sometimes these people have been annoying, and annoying things have happened.

> Let's be optimistic and say I'll live to 100. That means I've had, roughly, a third of all the interactions with other humans, that I’ll ever have.

> If that is the case, and we take into account some basic laws of probability, then that means I probably haven't met the most annoying person I'll ever meet.

> In other words, the most annoying thing that will ever happen to me, probably hasn't happened yet.

This is pretty distressing.

I've met some huge assholes in my time. HUGE.

Casting my mind back on the scale of all the annoying things that have happened to me, inevitably leads me to this conclusion:

Sometime in my future, I'm going to be kicked in the balls by George Bush, while he sings 'I Gotta Feeling' by the Black Eyed Peas."

Puts things in perspective, no?

Bryan Charles to Release a Memoir in October

Former local and fellow Gull Lake High School alumni Bryan Charles announced on his Facebook page today that his forthcoming memoir, "There's a Road to Everywhere Except Where You Came From," will be released in October.

The book -- which Charles has described on his website as a memoir of his first few years in New York City (after leaving the area surrounding our native Kalamazoo, Michigan) -- follows his stellar novel "Grab On to Me Tightly as if I Knew the Way" (Harper Perennial, 2006) and the recently released "Wowee Zowee" (Continuum, 2010), a contribution to the 33 1/3 series of books focused on classic music albums.

Charles was working in one of the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 -- he wrote a great short story about it, published here -- and it will be interesting to see how he addresses that in the forthcoming book, if at all.

Swartwood Reloads "Hint Fiction" Contest

There's still a day left to enter Robert Swartwood's "Hint Fiction Contest Reloaded," commemorating the one-year anniversary of Swartwood's "hint fiction" concept of creating "a story of 25 words or fewer that suggests a larger, more complex story."

The judge of the contest is the notorious James Frey, and the lucky winner he chooses will receive a plethora of literary goodies, including:

> $100

> A copy of "The Best of Every Day Fiction: Two"
> A copy of The Los Angeles Review
> A copy of Sententia
> A copy of Space and Time
> A copy of "[first year]: an mlp anthology"

> A copy of PANK
> A copy of Fox Force 5

In addition, the second-place winner will receive $50, the third-place winner will receive $25, and one of 10 copies of "Sudden Fiction Latino" will be awarded to each of the winners and finalists, as well as to some "random contestants."

To enter the contest, simply submit up to two entries in the comments section of the contest post. At the time of this writing there are 154 posts, many of which contain multiple entries. A personal early favorite is John Jodzio's "#2":

"Someone had written the word 'Shite' on our baby's forehead in permanent marker. Someone broke in, I said. No one broke in, my wife said."

The contest ends at midnight (EST) on April 30. Swartwood's "Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer" (that's the cover image above) is set for release from W.W. Norton & Company on Nov. 1.

Recommendations, Skips and Hmm's

I assume like most people, my time spent blogging is "extra" time, that fortuitous time that sometimes falls within the tiny spaces flanking the every day responsibilities of work and family and which more often than not is consumed with catching up on "Lost." That said, I have very little time for full-fledged reviews of books I'd recommend, recommend you skip or fall somewhere in between on. Thus the new, occasional Poetic Desperation abbreviated review feature, "Recommendations, Skips and Hmm's." Enjoy.

Recommendations:

1) "Dolls," prose poems by Tom Whalen (Caketrain Press, 2007). Whalen's "Dolls" is at once both infinitely creepy and saturated with a strange kind of sadness. The dolls that inhabit these prose poems terrify you at the same time they make you want to pick them up and hold them.

2) "Shutter Island," a novel by Dennis Lehane (William Morrow, 2003). The basis for a feature film of the same name released in February, I picked this one up as research for an interview I'm conducting in a week or so with Lehane in preview of a reading he's giving in my area. The book goes pretty much exactly where you think it's going to, but Lehane's great talent is in keeping you reading regardless. The dream sequences are fantastic.

Skips:

1) "during my nervous breakdown i want to have a biographer present ," poems by Brandon Scott Gorrell (Muumuu House, 2009). There are some interesting lines here, but the only thing I really liked about this book was the lack of page numbers. Seriously: I tend to be slightly OCD when it comes to making sure the page numbers are truly consecutive every time I turn a page, and Gorrell's book at least took that out of the equation.

2) "Just Before the Black," a short story by actor James Franco (in the current issue of Esquire). This short is presumably from Franco's first story collection, "Palo Alto," which will be released in hardcover by Scribner in October. I like Franco as an actor. He's great. But if this story is any indication of his capacity for writing, I'll pass on his written work in the future.

I can forgive Franco, for instance, for calling the building the narrator is sitting outside "tan" in paragraph two, then calling it "beige" in paragraph six, but in graph six when he writes, "The building is beige, but the shadows make it shadow-color," he loses me altogether. "Shadow-color"? That's just lazy writing. Was the sky sky-color? Was the car car-color?

Actually, we find that out in the trainwreck that is paragraph five, where he describes the car using the phrases "Grandpa's old blue boat" and "Grandpa's blue machine" within a handful of words of each other. We get it: It's Grandpa's car and it's blue.

Then we have graph seven, where Franco writes, "Joe smokes. His window is all the way down, and he breathes his smoke out the black gaping gap." A "gaping gap"? Maybe it's just me, but I usually assume a gap is gaping without having to be told. The phrase reads like a Dr. Seuss lyric.

Hmm's:

1) "How to Take Yourself Apart / How to Make Yourself Anew," prose poems by Aaron Burch (PANK Press, 2010). I say prose poems, but they could be flash fiction. Whatever. Unfortunately, this collection had two strikes against it before I even started reading: 1) It's a perfect-bound square, a structure that for me is always aesthetically annoying and always makes me feel like I'm reading a "Mr. Men" book; and 2) Why does the title say "Anew"? Why not just "New"? I realize "Anew" hearkens back to the "Apart," but it sounds clunky. Anyway, I liked the middle section of the three, but the other two did nothing for me. I'm mixed on this one.

2) "Wolf Parts," short fictions by Matt Bell (Keyhole Press, 2010). I usually dig Bell's work (what I've read of it), but not this one. I pre-ordered it through Bell's site and received an instant audio download, which I couldn't even get halfway through listening to before canceling my order for the book. It's not the writing; the writing is fine. It's the subject matter. It's billed as a "dark, fragmentary retelling" of "Little Red Riding Hood," and it is that, but it also touches on what to me sounds like child sexual abuse, which I don't really want on my bookshelf. If you can get past said issues with the subject matter, however, it's probably a decent read.

1,000 Words from Laconic Oration

That egg is a puppy! Just another one of the who knows how many awesome images up at the image blog Laconic Oration. I just wish they'd post more often (says the pot calling the kettle black).

Read Zachary Schomburg

Do yourself a favor and read Zachary Schomburg's "The Man Suit" (Black Ocean, 2007). Preferably now. This second.

Then read Schomburg's "Scary, No Scary" (Black Ocean, 2009) or, like me, browse through it constantly while letting it sit unfinished on a shelf because you don't want to face the prospect of waking up tomorrow with no new Schomburg to read.

Black Ocean offers free shipping on all retail orders of the books through their Web site, and as an added bonus orders of $25 or more come with a free book.

"The Man Suit," incidentally, was No. 4 on Small Press Distribution's Best-Selling Poetry list for 2009 ("Scary" was No. 9), and was No. 27 for the decade.