Split Lip Press is super excited to bring you Love & Sundries by poet Nicholas Reading. The book haunts, bites and sometimes breaks bone. If you dig visual and observant, narrative poetry, then this chapbook is for you. According to Keith Montesano, author of Ghost Lights and Scoring the Silent Film, Reading writes in “the hard-bitten spirit of Richard Hugo,” that the poems “tether themselves to hope amidst the elegiac emptiness of miles of flat land and peripheral characters who turn out to mean much more…”
Reading is a solid portrait of Split Lip’s aesthetic: poems full of grit and hurt that can, at times, get a little weird in the best way possible. Check out the sample below, and pardon the double-spacing we have no control over. YOUR BIRTHDAY SAYS FORGET YOU is one of our favorites. Once it’s one of your favorites, you can buy it HERE. Pick up a copy and support the poet.
Find out more about Reading at his WEBSITE. He’s a pretty big deal. Just ask him.
YOUR BIRTHDAY SAYS FORGET YOU
Maybe you found a street you didn’t know of
before. Maybe you were drunk and didn’t remember.
I hope the street said, Hello. And I expect you said
the same. And the lined streets reminded you of age
and that time when you were younger and shot
pigeons out of the sky with acuity. Complements
came by the bushel. Some said you were the best shot
since Liberty Valance. Look it up. Find a horse.
Treks we take are epic. A sunrise when we aren’t ready.
A moon when we’re just getting started. And sometimes
we’ll find a moment to be still. A nice creek to scramble in.
A very dark morning in Siberia. Really, nothing makes sense.
What life do we remember? I suggest to forget the memories
and create a future again and again and again tomorrow.
Gran trabajo .. Gracias
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