In episode #19 of Phoned-In, poet Feng Sun Chen reads from Butcher’s Tree and blud.

Feng Sun Chen, currently an MFA candidate at the University of Minnesota, does not pull punches in the fresh-cut Butcher’s Tree (Black Ocean), nor in her earlier chapbooks blud (Spork Press), Ugly Fish (Radioactive Moat), and Paul Thek (self-published). In these rebuses, your southern Uncle Remus’s reinterpreted with an unplaceable accent, all the rather many potatoes shall be oralized, airily, potAto, verily, verily. So try to get that in your head, Mr.

The poems in Butcher’s Tree Slap Chop authorial voices into an oracular mixed contemporary, swallowing tongues as worn smooth as St. Peter’s toe and regirding them with new grit: a respect for digesting tradition as corrosive to that tradition as stomach bile. In “Play” we are invited to “burn up the futurist museums.” But when the paintings are brought back to life, or so, they’re less Severini’s trains than Soutine’s turbinal carcasses—specimens in a pulsating, mutant meat market, of indeterminate genre, gender, species, space-time. In Butcher’s Tree's final sequence, a retelling of Beowulf mashed up with The Tempest, The Odyssey, The Little Mermaid and god only knows what else, Grendel’s male tongue is “castrated” by “the sea witch,” leaving a voiceless castrato—but “[This Grendel Is A Woman],” and can psych-sing in (parens) if you’ll ferret the melody down into its warren and out the other side with your unneutered eye.

In the kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is bluffing. Argos-eyed Chen, dreaming the archival dream, is a one-woman blind man’s bluff at the center of the cultural panopticon, pulling the so-called American hybrid inside out, like trying to vomit up your coccyx. You gotta dig deep, deeper than that.

On a break from her tentacularly diversified web presences, from blog to Tumblr to Action-affiliate left-field necrotheory site Montevidayo to collaborative advice column cowritten by “cheeks,” Feng Sun Chen and I recently sat down together at our respective terminals to do some digging via gchat. The last first word to my forthcoming coccyx, who chooses on this occasion to quote our august guest, who writes, in “Fourth of July”:

I am small, I am small. Here comes the parade! All that beauty!
I want to die! I want to die!
I want to die!

(Hear hear), my coccyx says, (here here).

me: hi, feng, how are you?

  ready for chaos?

Feng: yes. i am great when waiting for chaos

me: the wait is over

  so – i have some prepared questions to ask you, but i thought this way maybe there could be some more elasticity in the conversation

2:05 PM as long as you’re ok with it

Feng: yes. did u ever see Antichrist?

  i am thinking about the fox

me: i saw the trailer but never managed to catch it

Feng: there is a fox that says “chaos reigns”

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In episode #18 of Phoned-In, poet Ish Klein reads from Moving Day.

Ish Klein is both a filmmaker and a poet, so it’s no wonder that her second book of poems, Moving Day, seems to be infused with the light and movement of cinema (“Marquee me, the card/ entitled, MOVING DAY,” “I hear your voice beyond the screen.”) The poems in Klein’s latest collection contain a rare mixture of language. In this energetic, topic-hopping collection, Klein is somehow able to blend the formality of literary voices past (from “Be Here Hamlet”: “A puzzle how humans react to the loss of the life of a king,/ these royal feelings die,/ the awe in a way: a depth can die”) with a smattering of colloquialisms from every day life (In “Fairy Tales from the Web,” Klein speaks about the phenomena of online dating, “This is the magic of the machine./ The meeting and love trial and,/ if it works, the love made.”). Moving Day is chock full of exclamation points, which punctuate Klein’s poems (and the collection at large) with a sense of urgency.

Hannah Jansen You seem to have a fascination with discomfort. Moving Day is full of “hard, black-biled” language and “instants uneasy as amputees.” It’s haunting, ghost-filled, and gritty. Why do you think you return to that sense of unease throughout the collection?

Ish Klein I am often very uncomfortable because I still deal with my past in which senseless things have happened to me, and I have made many mistakes and have had misjudgments that bother me. A couple of things I deal with every day are anxiety and paranoia. Anyway I write from my state, but the state is getting better, I think.

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In episode #17 of Phoned-In, poet Sarah Gorham reads from her book Bad Daughter.

Perhaps Sarah Gorham’s most important contribution is the literary press she created with her husband: Sarabande Books. Gorham writes that, “Our focus is on poetry and short fiction, genres that in the recent past have received less than generous attention from the mainstream publishing industry.” In an interview with Nin Andrews from Best American Poetry, Gorham speaks about the two-sided nature of Sarabande Books, but her comments speak are especially apt regarding Bad Daughter:

The word sarabande has such an interesting history. A “sex dance” originating in the New World, imported to Spain, where it was banned in 1583 under penalty of death. Later, civilized by the English, German, French. The word suggested the kind of literature we look for: accomplished and elegant on the surface, with a wild underside.

Many of Gorham’s poems (e.g. “Scaffold for a Sonnet” and “Barbecue”) aren’t experimental with form, but what lies beneath is a certain untenable wildness.

Gigi Augsbach “Bust of a Young Girl in the Snow” is a great rumination on the role of memory in our lives. The idea that, “How often resurrection’s / a slight miscalculation / of past, present, and future . . . A little girl’s eyes / in winter, opened rigid and wide” is jarring and haunting in its evocation of how inexact memories are. In light of that, could you tell me how the oddity of memory plays out in Bad Daughter? Is a “bad daughter” a “bad daughter” or is that simply a function of memory and perception?

Sarah Gorham Here’s a secret: the “bust” is actually male. James Merrill as a little boy, actually, and it’s nailed down to a porch rail on his Water Street balcony in Stonington, CT. Jeffrey and I were poets-in-residence there in 2002. In winter, the bust looks rather horrifying—a boy/girl left in the cold, her face tarnished green and half-covered with snow. Hence the idea of a terrible mistake. Someone abandoned the child. The time machine was on the fritz, and now the child is imprisoned in this awful form. Memory offers a huge array of misperceptions, but none as permanent as this. Somewhere along the line, the child got the impression that she was “bad,” and it stuck.

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In episode #16 of Phoned-In, poet Amy King reads from I Want to Make You Safe.

Amy King was raised in what she described as a “backwoods” town in Georgia, as well as in Baltimore, until she moved to New York 11 years ago. On her blog and website she describes herself as a “Poet teacher and Activist.” The term is quite fitting since many of her poems are unmistakably political (e.g. “This Opera of Peace”). Many of the poems from I Want to Make You Safe, such as “Follow the Leader” and “The People of Things,” are rewarding upon a second read, while others still remain locked in King’s own imagination. Stanzas like, “We are all snow birds atop / the cherry blossoms of August / Springtime in Washington D.C. / passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose / brushing her teeth over the bedpan” make use of those imaginative leaps to make our emotional connection to the poem stronger (“Some Pink in Your Color”). King is also an English and Creative Writing Teacher at SUNY Nassau Community College. She also edits Esque Magazine with Ana Božičević.

Gigi Augsbach When you write, is a lot of it inspired by the classes you teach—by class exercises, students, etcetera?

Amy King More often, class assignments are born of my writing, and what I’m thinking about on any given day of the week. The students influence what I write insofar as any humans might, as well as what their presence says about how others construct “Amy King.”

That is, since I spend a chunk of time in classrooms (the hat makes the man) talking with people, aka “students,” and primarily querying how language works, from the minute to larger societal scales, resistance, it turns out, is futile (so said the Borg). I yam what I yam, or as Gertrude Stein wrote, “I am I because my little dog knows me.”

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Listen to a podcast of Miranda July reading from her new book It Chooses You at BookCourt bookstore in Brooklyn.

On November 15, 2011, Miranda July visited BookCourt bookstore and read from her new book, It Chooses You. BOMB was present as the official media sponsor, the event was packed with fans and listeners who converged at BookCourt, located at 163 Court St. in Brooklyn. Check out BookCourt’s website for a full list of upcoming readings and subscribe to BOMB’s podcast feed here.

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Listen to a podcast of a selection of readings by the 2011 National Book Award finalists, recorded live at the New School on November 15, 2011, in partnership with the National Book Foundation. For more information, visit www.nationalbook.org.

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The many sides of John Waters get split up into two books this season—BOMBlog investigates.

Cha-cha heels or not, save the holiday season and stuff a stocking with John Waters: Interviews and Role Models. It will bring a smile to the face of even the most hatchet-faced rebel outcast in your life. Explosive and stylish, like a molotov cocktail stuffed with an Hermes scarf, together, the two books show Waters on both sides of the interview. James Egan, editor of Interviews, culls 22 of the director’s most notable Q&As (including BOMB #87 with Dennis Cooper along with vintage articles tracing a scholarly arch of the firebrand for the venerable Conversations with Filmmakers Series of the University of Mississippi Press. This latest release follows up Waters’s own 2010 memoir Role Models (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux) including essays, many derived from conversations with the very people that have inspired him—Johnny Mathis, Little Richard, Leslie Van Houten, and Baltimore’s late lesbian stripper Lady Zorro to name a few.

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Feeling The Pinch? Soothe your economic anxiety with a podcast of BOMBlog literary all-stars, reading at the Fowler Arts Collective on October 21st.

On October 21st, 2011, BOMBlog brought four writers to the Fowler Arts Collective in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. This reading took place in conjunction with the art show, The Pinch, in which three local artists share their attempts to articulate something about the value of art in a time of economic hardship. Listen to a podcast of the reading featuring writers Luke Degnan, Sarah Gerard, B.C. Edwards, and Paul Legault.

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This BOMB podcast, recorded April 5, 2011, has been dug up from our archive, dusted off, and is now available for your listening pleasure.

This BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS is a conversation between poet/activist Amiri Baraka and stage/film actor Stephen Henderson—one of the foremost interpreters of the August Wilson canon. This event was recorded live at The Irondale Center in Brooklyn on April 5, 2011, as part of 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN series. It is the mission of 651 ARTS to deepen awareness of and appreciation for contemporary performing arts and culture of the African Diaspora and to provide professional and creative opportunities for performing artists of African descent. Visit www.651ARTS.org for more information.

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In this new installment of Phoned-In, Dan Boehl reads from his new book Kings of the F**king Sea and talks to Luke Degnan about his collaboration with Jonathan Marshall, censorship, and Spiderman 3.

Luke Degnan At the beginning of Kings of The F**king Sea, there is a “cast” page. Can you tell me how that relates to the rest of the book? Specifically, are we meant to think of Jack Spicer or Mark Rothko while reading certain poems?

Dan Boehl I think the “cast” of the book comes from a combination of Mary Jo Bang’s Louis in Love and John Hollander’s Reflections on Espionage: the Question of Cupcake. Bang included a “cast” in Louis in Love, one of the books that most affected me as a young poet. Bang’s cast served to personalize and contextualize the narrative’s characters immediately. I wanted this to happen in my narrative.

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Listen to Jim Shepard read from his book of short stories, You Think That’s Bad, at Greenlight Books this past April. Read an interview with Jim here from BOMB’s Spring Issue #115, on newsstands now.

Doomed missions, epics that are anything but sprawling, protagonists that are murderers, scientists, soldiers, even women—no one can accuse Jim Shepard of playing it safe when it comes to short stories. In April at Greenlight Bookstore, Shepard read only the introductions to three stories from his latest collection, You Think That’s Bad. He then spent the rest of the night taking questions from the audience. And given his candid style and unusual subject matter, there were plenty. He seemed to not even realize that the tough questions were tough—even “So, what’s the story behind your mustache?” (A: he’s been growing it since high school). Jessica Stockton Bagnulo, Greenlight Bookstore’s co-owner, called Shepard a “writer’s writer.” It’s clear why. Shepard has a humanizing way of explaining his work that resonates with writers especially. He does not claim to be a mere channel through which his message reaches the world. Nor was he the obsessive artist we sometimes picture writers to be, laboring over a keyboard for years to produce big fat novels. Shepard has an unassuming nature that is evident from spending time with him and a grasp on the authentic that is evident from reading his stories.

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This morning (April 22nd) a small private ceremony was held in Benghazi for journalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondos, killed while on assignment in Misurata, Libya. You can read CJ Chivers’ email account of the service here and Al Jazeera’s response to the tragedy here. Earlier this year, BOMB’s Montana Wojczuk sat down with Tim Hetherington and his directing partner, Sebastian Junger, on the occasion of their new documentary film, RESTREPO; we are re-posting the podcast below. 

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This BOMB podcast co-produced with 651 ARTS is a conversation between artist/performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph and Ntozake Shange.

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On a frigid Monday night in January, BOMBlog hosted a reading at Half King, the legendary bar and restaurant in Chelsea. Listen to a podcast of the event, featuring Luke Degnan, Ben Mirov, Dorothea Lasky, and Justin Taylor.

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On Thursday, November 18, 2010, Paul Auster read from his book, Sunset Park, at BookCourt Bookstore in Brooklyn, NY. Listen to the podcast here!

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On Wednesday, December 1, 2010, Jonathan Franzen read for a packed house at BookCourt Bookstore on 163 Court St in Brooklyn, NY. BOMB was there to record the event, and now you can listen to the reading here.

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This podcast features a conversation between composers Tania León and Philip Glass.

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In episode 14 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Heather Christle reads from her book The Difficult Farm and from her chapbook The Seaside!. Click through for a reading and a short Q&A.

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Just when you thought Eileen Myles’ poetry couldn’t get more fierce, her latest release Inferno (a poet’s novel) practically spontaneously combusts. Listen to a podcast of Jackie Wang’s conversation with Myles and check out the book from OR books.

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Justin Spring, just nominated for a National Book Award for his seminal biography, The Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade with poet and biographer, Honor Moore at the New York Public Library, on September 29, 2010. Listen to a podcast of the conversation, and check out the video highlights.

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On Wednesday, October 6, at 7:30pm BOMB contributors Barbara Browning, Christian Hawkey, and Kim Rosenfield convened at Greenlight Books for a series of readings. Pictures and audio for those who missed, or those who wish to re-live, are posted here.

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Better late than never! Listen to Gary Shteyngart read from his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story, at BookCourt this past July. A short Q&A follows the (hilarious) reading.

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This special episode of Phoned-In features poems from issue #1 of the journal Telephone. Click through to listen to 12 poets read their translations of a poem by Uljana Wolf and read an interview with editors Sharmila Cohen and Paul Legault.

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In episode 12 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Jim Behrle reads a selection of his work. Click through for a reading and a short Q&A.

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Listen to David Mitchell read from his new novel, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, at BookCourt on July 16th, 2010. David Mitchell is the author of five novels, most notably number9dream and Cloud Atlas, which were both listed for the Booker Prize. A short Q&A follows the reading.

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Why am I here–in this house–in this world–which also holds a man screaming as other men saw at his neck with an inadequate knife? In episode 11 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Mairéad Byrne reads from her book, The Best of (What’s Left of) Heaven. Click through for the reading and a short Q&A.

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If there is an edge to painting, has anyone ever jumped off? Klein jumped, or so staged it. He is the point of departure for Joyce Kim’s most recent body of work.

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In episode 10 of Phoned-In, BOMB Magazine’s poetry reading by phone podcast, Ben Mirov reads from his book, Ghost Machine. Click through for a reading and a short Q&A.

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Watch one of Minter’s Food Porn commercial slots and listen to a podcast of her speaking about her new monograph at Strand Books in Manhattan.

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BOMB podcast of Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage and April Yvette Thompson at their 651 ARTS’ LIVE & OUTSPOKEN performance on Tuesday, May 18th, 2010.

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