Dear Friends and Fans of Poetry,
It is with beaming pride that I'm happy to say that Spooky Girlfriend Press is turning ten years old this year. When I started the press in a basement apartment in Minnesota while earning my MFA, I couldn't imagine the amazing authors I'd get to work with or the stunning quality of poetry I'd have the privilege of releasing. We published Nicole Steinberg's debut, Getting Lucky. We've published 13 physical chapbooks (including a pizza poem anthology and a non-fiction collection) and three digital titles. We love what we do and we want to GO BIG this year and release another essential collection into the world.
Help Us Celebrate Our 10-Year Anniversary!
To celebrate, we want to publish our second full-length collection of poetry by the amazingly talented Amber Nelson. Many of you may recognize Amber as one of the driving forces behind the much beloved (and missed) alice blue. But in addition to promoting the work of others, Amber is a great poet in her own right and we think her book, The Sexiest Man Alive, will be a book you love. Here's Amber talking a little big about where this book came from:
"So, one day, in 2011, I was at the grocery store waiting in line. The line was kind of long and I was pretty tired from an exerting session at the gym, and People Magazine was there, just staring at me. And I was staring back, looking at this cover full of women who I didn’t recognize. And I was just confused. Like, aren’t these magazines supposed to be covered with famous people so that you want to buy them and read all about the intimate and sordid details of their lives?
You see, I was relatively freshly out of grad school where I took classes, taught classes, worked a part time job, partied a little too much, and didn’t have a television. It was during this time that the movie Twilight came out. I was home for the holidays and told my mom “Hey, I hear there’s a new vampire movie out. Wanna go see it?” That was literally the only thing I knew about this phenomenon going in. It was a couple weeks before I learned of the chaos that surrounded it.
My life in Seattle my first year after grad school wasn’t much different from my time going to grad school in Boise, except replace partying too much with training for a 100 mile bike ride and volunteering and watching old movies with my gang of introverts.
Anyway, back to the grocery store – there I was staring at these strangers and thinking about the weird nature of celebrity. At work the next day, I asked my coworkers for any old issues of People they might have lying around. The first that came to me? The Sexiest Man Alive 2011: Bradley Cooper. I didn’t know what I was doing, only that I wanted to think about this, this weird thing, this celebrity, this elective public eye, this performance of self. And so these poems were born.
Writing them was an exercise in patience. They are hard to write. Tons of research went in to each one, building a large corpus of pubic speech to work from. And then came the laborious process of picking at and shaping that public speech into something that ultimately represented each Sexist Man Alive’s performance of their own self as I experienced it. Writing them took a lot of mental and emotional energy, and a fair amount of coffee, beer and wine.
In the end, it was all worth it. I learned a lot about these strangers. I learned a lot about what it means to be a celebrity, and it isn’t all pretty. It’s not always a romping good time. But sometimes it is.
I also quickly learned who the women were on the cover of that fateful People Magazine. They were the Kardashians."
Your Contribution!
Your help will go a long way in making Amber's book a reality! First and foremost, your contribution will help pay for production costs of the book (300 copies). Your generosity will also help with the following:
- Shipping! (Getting Lucky taught us how much it costs to ship books)
- Art! (proper compensation for our great cover artist, Ben Giles)
- Amber! (funds for a book tour)
Spooky Girlfriend Press is a labor of love that's made possible by supporters of small, independent presses, like you. I sincerely thank you for your time and consideration and hope you'll join us in celebrating ten years of the press by helping us publish The Sexiest Man Alive!
Spookily,
Nate
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What People Are Saying About The Sexiest Man Alive
"I thought it would be funnier, honestly. Lighter. A “romp” of some sort. It made me laugh, it made me cry, it made me punchy, but ultimately it left me sort of aghast and that’s hard to do. It made me think about how trapped people can be by their performance of self, by cultural ideas of maleness, and about the generational trauma that gender can inflict. How the internet, the speed of the media/culture, and the increasing mad-grab commodification here in domestic capitalism’s twilight, has changed celebrity and our relationship to it. I had to rethink about what is sexy to me, to other people, and what that means. This shift away from nuance and reflection (and patriarchal life-lesson passing) towards a frantic look-at-me shallowness of concentrated maleness-as-product-for-consumption, with its ultimate loss of real sense of self/place in humanity, I mean… :/ " -- Sarah Gallien, cofounder and editor, alice blue review
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Links
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Facebook: Spooky Girlfriend Press
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Twitter: @Spooky_GF_Press