poetry/fiction/lit type stuff

I have a new book launching Nov 19, and will have parties in Buffalo (Nov 19th) and Rochester (Dec 3rd) to celebrate. Here is a sample that seems relevant: Now It’s Personal The streets were rivers of stars and lovers and the rain came and cooled the hearts of both. Cafes and doorways flooded as the streets jumped their banks. Skulls shrunk, mouths swelled, the chatter was all of angels: angels of marginalia, angels of the engine infernal, angels of my first time, all the cherubim and seraphim of a world bone-drenched by heaven after heaven, heavens plastered on warehouse walls, heavens honking from passing cabs and radios perched on hot dog carts, heavens crackling through the space between satellites.      And as the streets turned to steam the chatter turned and spun itself into a husk the shape of a body, and a man rose from the crowd and donned the husk, showed his teeth, then spoke to the stars and lovers gathered below:      This is my shape, this is my skin, you called and I am here.        The ones who believed believed it was always thus, while the skeptics were not invited to return.        Rooks along the roofline counted…
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I got interested in obscure Catholic saints a while back, so I wrote this ring of sonnets, then forgot about it. This seems like a good place, and time, for it: From the Periphery (Lesser-Known Saints) Saint Brioc “Please remember: dawn came, and we were freed, freed from the devils that stir up the sea, and we were grateful. Grace hid us a while from their strange eyes and teeth; grace is not guile, however, and so we beg the Lord’s mercy for those brethren swallowed by the beast before reaching Rome. Their souls will surely ascend, and they will go join in the feast of light. The King’s feast, here, is also fine, and so we give thanks, but these earthly fruits are but shadows of divine sustenance. And though we made not Rome, Cornwall does shine upon a kind of hill… so end your disputes. Pure hearts do not bicker with providence.” Saint Ludmilla “Pure hearts do not bicker with providence, nor swear allegiance to the methods of man; providence is a mountain of fire, and method but a cave in that mountain. So, though I cannot decide who loves me, I can give birth, and force, at…
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Such a lovely day, -14 celsius outside, everything crisply frozen, windows steaming a bit where the cats sits, plenty of work to do inside and out, and, oh, more lost souls murdering people, this time in Paris, a bomb goes off outside an NAACP office in Colorado, so many sad, twisted people with no other way to exert power or make sense of this world but to lash out, take their revenge on the rest of us. Hannah Arendt: “…even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth – this conviction is the inarticulate background against which these profiles were drawn. Eyes so used to darkness as ours will hardly be able to tell whether their light was the light of a candle or that of the blazing sun. But such objective evaluation seems to me a matter or secondary importance which can be safely…
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Wonderful Michigan poet. Love your poem, Jim: Young Bull The bronze ring punctures the flesh of your nose, the wound is fresh and you nuzzle the itch against a fence post. Your testicles are fat and heavy and sway when you shake off flies; the chickens scratch about your feet but you do not notice them.   Through lunch I pitied you from the kitchen window– the heat, pained fluid of August– but when I came with cold water and feed, you bellowed and heaved against the slats wanting to murder me.     .

By me–this journal has an interesting idea, everyone who submits then votes on other submissions, 3 rounds of voting, and the top however many get in the journal. It’s certainly a different approach than the editor or editorial board as guardian of taste… http://www.sixfold.org/PoSum13/Pietrzykowski.html