What’s a few malapropisms among friends?

At last! Those hunky boys from The National have dropped their new album. Can someone write a book-length, lyrical, earnest Pitchfork parody already? It could be the new Autobiography of Red.

What better accompaniment to updating poetry news than the dusky (and no, I don’t mean husky) vocal stylings of Matt Berninger?

I’ll be kicking off the Summer Poetry Salon at Washington College’s Rose O’Neill Literary House, thanks to director (and fellow diplomat-brat-poet) Jehanne Dubrow. Music. Edibles. Ryan Teitman.

June brings: 4:30 wake-ups, poems skinny and skinnier, exploring possibilities for rhubarb and leeks, reading on Kazakhstan, Vienna, and Budapest, headstand, singing for Evening Man, shedding tired vices for quirky virtues. And Kundiman, where I’ll be a fellow!

Although poetry submissions are closed, I’m curating a folio on Debt for Drunken Boat. Submit.

 

 

Chloe Honum, she of the gorgeous lyric, was gracious enough to tag me for a self-interview in the Next Big Thing series. You can find her responses here.

1. What is your working title of your book?

My first book, Double Agent, came out last year. I’m working on a manuscript now that’s either called Purge or The Pretender Queen or My Grandfather’s Hummus & Other Tales.

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?

Double Agent is not project-based; it was a massy, mutating thing. During my MFA at the University of Michigan. I wrote short narrative poems about coming of age in the Eastern Bloc during the 80’s and 90’s, and the weirdness and incongruity of living in or near American embassies throughout. After graduate school, I taught at a New England boarding school for five years, and wrote poems in response to the weirdness and incongruity of being an authority figure/adult to three hundred teenagers on a bucolic campus that abutting a depressed former mill town…the scenery changed, but the concerns remained the same. Community, privilege, privacy, facades. I also fell in love very quickly and eventually got hitched, so that informed the manuscript. Currently, I’m living in DC and in the grips of a bipolar session, vintage Libra: spare, sound-driven couplets and big, yodeling spatter-poems.

3. What genre does your book fall under?

Poetry.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

I wish I could cast someone androgynous, elegant, swathed in dove-gray cashmere, with devastating eyebrows and a wry mouth, to play the “I” of Double Agent – Charlotte Rampling, Charlotte Gainsbourg. Any Charlotte, really. But my speaker is more like Peter Sellers in Being There meets Janeane Garofalo in Reality Bites.

5. What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

From a lovely review by Heidi Erdich:

Like an agent, these poems are on the prowl, and often the subject of the search is the father—but not always an actual father—and not the icon we might expect, but a more complicated patrimony of language, image, country, and the self as projected across time and continents.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Double Agent won Kore Press’ First Book Award.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

Too many things have been called a “first draft” to really say. Somewhere between a month and five years.

8. What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Comparisons make me queasy.

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My parents and my husband and Nabokov. My students and teachers.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

 If you’re a fan of Mulholland Drive, there’s an 89% chance you will enjoy this book.

 

 

Continue reading →

- Split This Rock, the force and festival that asks poets to be political & provocative, has named my l’il tome a “recommended book of 2012.”

- An interview in which I expound of line breaks, deli meats, adolescence, and Foucault’s “Discipline and Punish”  can be found here. 

 

 

Check out the new issue of Boxcar Poetry Review, which features my poem “How Fiction Works” (spasibo, James Wood!) and two poems at A Poetry Congeries.

Toast, too, 2012′s uber-deserving NEA recipients, including Lisa Fay Coutley, Traci Brimhall, and Sarah Blake Schoenholtz, who gifted Drunken Boat with selections from her Kanye West series.

We live in DC now, which, according to some financial magazine (Forbes? Fortune?) is the second hippest city in the States.

Houston, I slap your face with my glove!

Many thanks to poet and fellow dip-brat Jehanne Dubrow for inviting me to read as part of Washington College’s Summer Poetry Salon in May! Check out her newest book, Red Army Red: punchy, lyrical, elegant. Like a shot of horseradish vodka. Home-infused.

Double Agent, winner of the 2011 Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry, is now available.

“Michelle Chan Brown’s collection takes us on journeys across continents by way of hard fact combined
with the subtlest of strangeness, the eeriest musicality, and the most startling of shifts and observations.
Hers is an entirely new vision and voice. This collection is a real achievement, but, most of all, it is haunting.”

—Laura Kasischke

“A poet alert to every least quiver in the inner and outer worlds; the grace, gusto, humor, and intimacy
of these richly vivid and unusually quotable poems are the most generous of gifts. Double Agent is an
altogether enthralling debut.”

—Gary Lutz

“A vivid, near-submerged world; I paid particular attention to the ways in which
containment and incompetence were worked out by the writer. Chan Brown sets a
strict boundary—“Don’t wait”—only to assess its transgression: “Come quickly.”
Go. Come back. Stay. Double Agent is a flip-book of the very best kind.”

—Bhanu Kapil, Judge

Double Agent is a manifestation of the poet’s pet obsession—the
dangers and comforts of community. Brown traverses many
territories in the poems—embassies, subdivisions, cottages, islands
and compounds, real and imaginary. Bhanu Kapil, who teaches
writing and thinking Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics, chose Double Agent from over 350 entries as
the winner of the 2011 First Book Award for Poetry. What emerges
in Double Agent’s poems is a concern for borders, and how they
materialize in the personal (love, family, consciousness) and the
political (country, race, gender), as well as their relationship to
physical and psychological security. A secondary question is how
the poetic self or the “I” can move, sometimes queasily, sometimes
bombastically, always uncertainly, through them.