| author | books | poetry | about | audio/ site map | submit | Tea Leaves: mothers & daughters | links/contact | readings/appearances |
amusejanetmason.com
Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters by Janet Mason (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info
check out Janet Mason's author blog
read Janet Mason's latest piece in The Huffington Post --Chick-fil-A: What Would Gandhi Do If He Were Gay?
"Hitching To Nirvana is a magnetic forcefield, not just pulling us beautifully into the story, but into our own lives. It's rare when a writer can open the shared world with such a deft, personal touch." --CA Conrad, readings/appearances, Book of Frank
Hitching To Nirvana -- by Janet Mason --now available!!!!
-- a novel of midlife and adolescence (in e-book or paperback)
Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info
This
commentary was aired on This Way Out, a worldwide lesbian and gay radio
syndicate based in Los Angeles.
Tea Leaves: a memoir of mothers and daughters (Bella Books April 2012) is now available -- click here for more info
Deviant
Propulsion
CA Conrad
Soft Skull Press, 2006
Poet, visionary and human liberationist CA Conrad brings us
a new and necessary queer aesthetic in his collection of poetry Deviant
Propulsion published in 2006 by Soft Skull Press. This aesthetic is
not one of grasping (me too me too) assimilation and it is also not one of
rebelling against this in predictable ways.
What CA Conrad wishes for us--is to be more free, to have conversation with ourselves, to observe life so keenly that new vision is rearranging the molecules.
In the last stanza of "Subterrestrial Aria for Kevin Killian & Dodie Bellamy: 1st Watch," Conrad writes:
imagine tasting/ wind through/ field of / wheat in/ bread
Leafing through the book, letting the words filter in slowly, the shapes of the sounds in his visual word play, I find myself falling into some ancient poetic place-tracing the cave paintings with my eyes and sifting through the fragments of a civilization in ruin to find shards of happiness, some of which are entire poems:
some mornings your hair is EXACTLY the way you want it when you wake up and you don't shower to not mess it and you want the trees of Philadelphia to smell EXACTLY who you are sweat and semen of your lover MY GOD IT'S BEAUTIFUL OUT HERE it feels good until it feels superficial and then you feel guilty and if you are lucky you stop…understand guilt as someone else's idea AND YOU GET THE love again
In Conrad's world, filled with the blood and grit of the world that we all live in, the birth of happiness begins with the birth of language.
In
the Black Forest
Before the Birth of Rilke
under
her skirts of bark
the hidden pencils grow
Even as Conrad brings us a new queer aesthetic he smashes the walls of every form of categorization, writing as he does--
carry
another/sex on your sex/in your fellow/human streets/look and look/listen
listen/this risen/spirit
trying
hard/ to belong/ to no one
hail down/the want!
In a time when so many voices are silenced and when so many others inevitably
blur together, Conrad rises above the crowd with his vibrato of unique authenticity.
Many stake claims on becoming the great American novelist--but Conrad in his
insistence of being himself and pointing out the absurd and then, often, delighting
in becoming it, writes in a voice that is rooted in the screaming-to-be-liberated
psyche of this country:
above
anything
i value my
American
roots of
dissidence
maintenance
of
removing control
off me control off
me control of me
commit the
muscle
to love
| author | books | poetry | about | audio/ site map | submit | Tea Leaves: mothers & daughters | links/contact | readings/appearances |