I Believe in Gregory Sherl and Gregory Believes in Tom Hanks and That Is Why Everyone Should Buy His Book About Dysentery: An Interview with Gregory Sherl

HFR: So, The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail is your second book, and it differs significantly from either Heavy Petting or I Have Touched You. How would you say your focus—sense of project, compilation, completion—has changed, when it comes to working on full-lengths, having released these works, if it has changed any?

GS: This is an interesting question, because, in actuality, all of this is backwards. The first book I actually finished writing was The Oregon Trail Is the Oregon Trail, and it was also the first book I was contracted for. It just turned out to be the second book (third if we're counting the chapbook) that was released. J.A. Tyler, an unbelievably brilliant and kind editor and mastermind behind Mud Luscious Press, put a shit-ton of stock in my work very early on, before he or anyone else probably should have. The confidence I built from the Oregon Trail love helped me grow the courage to put together Heavy Petting (parts of it were written before and after The Oregon Trail) and also write and submit I Have Touched You to the Dark Sky Chapbook Contest.

I don't know if I am making any sense.

How I set my focus now, as opposed to before these books were released, is different purely by scope, but that might also mean intent. Everything is bigger because I am always expecting more from myself. I never sit down to write one poem. Now, it's an entire collection. I want to write a poem about God? Better write a whole book of semi-linked poems called The Bible by Gregory Sherl (which is mostly done and looking for a publisher, by the way). I want to write a poem about Dana Scully's pantsuits? Better start an entire collection of prose poems based around The X-Files. Might as well call it Everything Is Weird.

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Review: God's Autobio, by Rolli

If God's Autobio, by "Canadian writer/poet/artist," Rolli, is to be described as any singular thing, it is easily a thesis on voice. A tremendous list of characters inhabits the stories, from the pompous banal to the British Almighty, each an immediate identity which is less introduced and more splashed upon the page in a gleeful display of certainty. Characters are eager to and expertly capable of building themselves a lavish home in the reader's thoughts, often in such an abbreviated length of page as to seem a magician's trick. 

Such certainty poses risks, though, and at times where the voice of a story appears determined to be violently its own self, another character has already inhabited that same harshness. Yet, any familiarity is delightfully shattered by a surrealism or, later, a gentle madness that accumulates and differentiates each story as they progress. 

At first, I could barely distinguish myself from the medium in which I traveled; but it seemed that, the higher I rose, the more individual I felt, and the more solid.

These words, aptly spoken by God himself referring to his own creation in the collection's eponymous short, exemplify the experience of reading God's Autobio.

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HFR Editors' Pick #26: The Tunnel, by Russell Edson

For some reason there was a vein of teeth that had developed without jaw or appetite in the earth, like precious stones or metals.
The toothless came here to bite the earth and to come away with teeth stabbed into their gums.
No telling what one would come up with, tusks, tiny mouse teeth...A toothless man no longer toothless cried through hippopotamus teeth, I have got myself handsome with a smile full of hippopotamus teeth!
Ah, but teeth are designed to a diet. He with cows' teeth ate grass saying, I do not like grass, but I eat grass because it fits my teeth. A cripple who must wear an ugly shoe; never mind the glass slipper. If the shoe fits, wear it.
And so they wore their teeth like shoes. Many allowing this wisdom walked on their teeth. Others, moving one more step in logic, kicked their feet into the earth, driving teeth into their feet.
These are funny shoes, said some, but if the shoe fits...
Others began to chew their food by stamping on it.
And so they came one more step in logic, and stuffed shoes in their mouths, crying, we have got leather teeth.

It was terrible that dentistry had come so far only to die at the foot of human logic.

—"The Death of Dentistry," from The Tunnel, by Russell Edson

"Curating," by J. Bradley

This HFR podcast HFR 1.1 contributor J. Bradley reads an essay concerning the love poem, entitled, "Curating." Full text follows below.

Curating

Inevitably, love fails, through break ups, divorce, or death. For most, this is incredibly hard to swallow, except for the poet who continues writes love poems.

The concern from some potential partners is that they will become fodder, research, like instead of fucking them behind the stacks in some unused part of the library, they become the stacks you are going to fuck them over with. I assure you this is incredibly far off from the truth.

From an economic standpoint, the love poem is inexpensive. While the labor costs might run high, depending on your skill level, the materials to which require the creation of a love poem are incredibly cheap if you keep it lo-fi (nice cursive handwriting on notebook paper). Executed well, the unspoken thriftiness of the gift will be completely ignored for the love poem’s priceless emotional value. From an emotional standpoint, a love poem is a great way to capture a moment or a feeling impossible to capture with pictures or non-fiction; essays aren't sexy but boudoir photos are sometimes.

However, love poems should never substitute for couples counseling. Missed your anniversary? Here's a poem about how we should celebrate our love every day instead of on just one day. Wondering why I never buy you flowers? Here's a poem about how flowers die sooner than our love and that's why I never buy them. Got drunk and possibly messed around with a stranger? Here's a poem about the dangers of Jack Daniels and Coke and how our love is like Bruce Springsteen singing "Secret Garden". The economic and emotional impact of using love poems as a relationship deus ex machina varies from state to state and whether you have children.

Poets write love poems most of all because we think they are enough to keep you around, suspend the belief that love ends inevitability.

I didn't grow up around good relationship models, watching the slow, furious decline of my mother's second marriage. I thought like with all of my mother's other mistakes, I would learn from this one; I haven't learned enough. I still wouldn't trade all of these exhibitions of failure for anything.

"Curating," by J. Bradley

Editors' Pick #26: Light Boxes, by Shane Jones

Thaddeus

The first hot-water attack takes place from our home on the hill. We spend the first night filling large buckets with boiling water. We keep them hot by lighting small fires with piles of tree branches. We pour the buckets downhill toward the town. A cloud of steam rises into the sky as wide, empty trenches expand in the snow. The War Effort applauds like they are watching theater. The midget does somersaults down the hill. For a moment yellow streaks the sky. When I angle my face into the rays of sun, I notice the sky trembling around one of the holes. I see footprints running from the first to the second hole, where the dangling feet are no longer visible. I tell Selah look up. She does but says she can't see anything except the clouds separating a little. And then the sky flutters like a flag, and then it goes black like closed curtains of wool.

—from Light Boxes, by Shane Jones

All You Have to Do Is Breathe: An Interview with David Gerbstadt

 

On this second HFR podcast episode I interview We Are Really Good Ppl's poster artist David Gerbstadt, about his autobiographical book, One Breath At a Time, now available in print on Amazon.com, or as a pdf from uploadnsell.com.

All You Have to Do Is Breathe: An Interview with David Gerbstadt

HFR Editors' Pick #25: The Boy Who Killed Caterpillars, by Joshua Kornreich

Phil Donahue was on the TV when I killed her.

I was watching the Donahue show before I killed her and it might have still been on when I killed her, but I'm not sure.

But I think it was.

Today I watched Donahue in the den.

I ate pretzels, drank juice, and scratched my head as I watched Donahue talk on the TV.

Donahue's the man with the white hair and big glasses who's always yelling.

I remember Donahue was yelling really loud about something like he always does, but he was similing, too.

He was yelling, but he was smiling, too.

He was yelling, but I don't think he was yelling because he was mad.

I remember lowering the volume on the TV so my dad wouldn't wake up and yell at me.

I didn't want my dad to yell and shake his face at me like he did the last time I woke him up.

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HFR Editors' Pick #24: Out of Time, by Geoff Schmidt

Vladimir is a squirrel monkey. His arms are bound and his hands sheathed and there's a metal device that frames his face and a metal arm that holds the cigarettes to his lips. Electrodes attached to his side jolt him if he doesn't inhale regurarly. His last cigarette is his 23,519th. It's supposedly non-addictive, peppermint-flavored, and a good source of fiber. The cigarettes taste like shit and the monkey knows they're eating him up inside but still he'd rather inhale than get the jolt. Or maybe he knows the jolt will make him inhale anyway, so why not do it without the pain? Because you'd think after a while you'd get used to the jolts but you don't. Like thick fingers stuck into your sides rawrubbing. Haw haw. But cigarette after cigarette after cigarette after cigarette. Face in clamps, staring through bars at cinderblock painted beige. And just because he's a squirrel monkey, don't think he doesn't apprehend how completely fucked up his life is. There's one nice research assistant who strokes behind his ears and calls him Vladimir—which to his ears sounds something like the noise three fat raindrops make falling on a broad leaf—but the rest of it is just cigarettes cigarettes cigarettes, beige beige. Jolt jolt. He barely remembers broad leaves. He can only just taste fat raindrops. So if a squirrel monkey's prayers could bring about the end of the world, you could hold Vladimir responsible. Silos open on the plains, on the steppes. Missiles ignite. Aerosal bombs release virii and toxins.  Everywhere everywhere with a finger on a button pushes that button. Vladimir puffs. He finishes a cigarette.

—from "The Last Cigarette," by Geoff Schmidt

Not Verner Herzog: An Interview with J.A. Tyler & John Dermot Woods

In this first ever HFR podcast, I talk to writers J.A. Tyler & John Dermot Woods about their collaborative novel, No One Told Me I Was Going to Disappear, forthcoming from Jaded Ibis Press, among other things.

Not Verner Herzog: An Interview with J.A. Tyler & John Dermot Woods

Review: Hotel Utopia, by Robert Miltner

I started the trip early in the morning. I was on my way to Chicago to see an old friend of mine. I hadn’t seen her since she left last August. I’m accustomed to travel and the solitude, but not quite the emptiness of time that rests between activities. So, when the Megabus lurched forward, I made a note of the time between rest stops, between coffees or smokes, between bathroom breaks, and meals. A writer friend of mine had given me his copy of Hotel Utopia, saying it was “important.” I began reading it while the bus pulled out of the parking allotment.

A bleak Midwestern landscape rolled past my window, probably. I had to imagine it. I imagine I traveled past countless farms with their twisted, forgotten machinery freezing in the fields. I imagine I traveled past gutted steel mill towns that dot the heartland of America like stars in a rusted-out constellation. When the bus stopped in Toledo for the first time, I jumped out for a cigarette. I had finished the little book, and even though I saw nothing pass the static winter of my window, I felt burdened by my ignorance.

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