98% of bugs and robots agree

Gillian Conoley is fantastic. (And she's a Texan, you know, disguised as a Californian.)

Haven't yet read the new one, but after catching her at KGB a few years ago I have read and reread Lovers in the Used World about a dozen times.

(And BPK's The Orchard is so on my bookfair must-have list, along with Susan Wheeler's Legend.)

Here is a poem from Lovers in the Used World for you to enjoy while I spend the day panicking because I'm afraid I'll forget to pack something. She read this one at KGB and I remember her introducing it with a remark about grammar that is intentionally (I did not have s3x with that woman) or unintentionally (misunderestimate) covert, and about a multiplicity of voices. I wish I could remember it better for you.

[She uses some very long lines, so I've used the pre tag & reduced the pt size.]

The Violence

We must try to rid evil of our character, the president says.

The president is paling, another mouth of extinction, suggested the Fox.

I said over here, goddamn it, and not in the garage. I was
fourteen,

and learning to drive,
I knew that beloved must not be a monster in the head.

And so, the world sins, it is exhausted, ministering to the misbegotten.

And so, shuttered in the subway, a murderer
rides between the cars, so that he is before the wrong,
and the dead wrong, brother.

I was far from home. He held up a blank sign and I let him in the car. I did not want to tarry.

My beloved is not
a monster in the head, my beloved is either
God's vengeance or his love,

entrails or insight,
I can only give you my word, though the fire in my eyes
is almost
his fire.

Genet: "A miracle is unclean: the peace I was searching for
       in the latrines and that I' m seeking
       in the remembrance is a reassuring and silky peace."

Heraclitus: "Come in, there are Gods here, too.
             Don't be a stranger at the threshold."

In the tear of a pattern
no fleece shall cover you.
no seed-time, no unguent, no mythical birds, no eternal variant, gentian, algebraic,

no
eloquent
          alcohol, in the tear of the pattern,
no weed-grown

trail where a person could rest
in one
of a few mutilated copies--

Our no God sitting low on the other half of the tree, her shroud drawn over her hair--

Then take the cloth up again, the president says.

In the tear of the pattern, the wolf is whole, suggested the Fox.

And you are most vile.
You are a threshold spikily
gone through.

So this is your winter body, so this is your summer ass.

Sunlight glints over the breasts and in the early evening newspaper, God's vengeance, 
or his love,

whose voice
so lightly        come of wounds

who loves           this way--