#Brute of the Stars (Dark Brandon Verse)

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8 SPD Books Regarding Material Girl

IN THIS MONTH'S SPD CLICKHOLE. By Nich Malone

I wake up in the morning wrapped in my millennial pink bedsheets. I'm hungry. I have $24.73 in my checking account. My knee hurts. I know in my heart that it's okay to be hung over on a Tuesday. I open my laptop to YouTube and type in M-A-D-O-N-N-A, all caps, letting the "Up next" feature take me where I need to be. Which is work, eventually, but right now it's just me and my thread count, dressed up in Madonna music videos like a prayer to my current material condition. Time goes by so slowly. I'm hung up on you, Madonna music video playlist. I want my life to be like those fierce stair walking sequences that eventually shows up in the majority of you. Just that on repeat, forever. It feels like home.

Which brings us to this month's HANDPICKED theme at SPD which is MATERIAL! And 'cause we're living in a material world, this month we're focusing on Material Girl.

In the wise words of Madonna: You try everything you can to escape The pain of life that you know When all else fails and you long to be Something better than you are today I know a place where you can get away

...and it's within these 8 SPD books! Okay, Madonna didn't say that last part. She's actually talking about the dance floor. But why not let these books be your dance floor! So hold tight to your pomegranate martini and let each verse, each line break, open your heart. These are the ones you've been dreaming of.

1. Material Girl by Laura Jaramillo (Subpress)

"Before Madonna was Monroe, before Monroe, Mina Loy, before Mina Loy, was Laura Jaramillo, who crosscuts a multitude of materialities so that a girl will appear, abject, yet a star, a girl who lives in Italian movies and in Queens, who, knowing her Adorno, is as well a materialist girl, a dazzling embodiment of critical thought and purest longing, awakening to life in and away from the city. True, as she intimates, Manhattan may not exist, but the romance of it lives on in every lyrical, sharp-eyed, exhilarating, witty, and sad line of this marvelous book. Reader, beware: Laura Jaramillo will make you miss New York so much it hurts, even if, especially if, you've never been there."—Joseph Donahue

2. Giving Godhead by Dylan Krieger (Delete Press)

"If a girl, a virus, a horned animal, milkweed, an exchange of cash for dirty looks, the near-rhyme of greed to death, the names of all brutes, and a shroud in which was wrapped the erect ascendant all met in an ovum and, lodged deep in the earth's core, fused into a supernova. If, from that long ago time until this very moment—perhaps even into the future—that supernova were listening in on us, her grave canal located such that she were overexposed to US American politicovangelizing, all at once began to speak: this is what she says." —Danielle Pafunda

3. The Galaxy Is a Dance Floor by Bianca Lynne Spriggs (Argos Books)

Bianca Lynne Spriggs, a poet and visual artist, records, catalogs, and mythologizes our all-at-once grotesque and heart-wrenching present. Her irresistible voice imparts upon her readers the natural world, the cosmos, our hearts, all retransmitted through a prism of sensuous and enchanted language. In The Galaxy is a Dance Floor, we encounter "a nursery for unborn stars." We are asked to consider: "You think the cosmos was engineered / by elements that always perform / like the rest?" Before you realize it, Spriggs will be "feasting on the savory red sugar of you."

4. These Branching Moments: Forty Odes by Rumi (Copper Beech Press)

Translated from the Persian by John Moyne and Coleman Barks. These are the first English translations in nearly a hundred years of the great 13th-century Sufi poet's finest odes. At once clear and mysterious, passionate and idealistic, witty and profound, they are filled with down-to-earth images of time transcended. For Rumi, life is not a pointless series of discrete events but a tree of "branching moments." The way to discover this truth, his poems reveal, is to follow the mystical via affirmative, whereby true happiness is found not by rejecting the world but by plunging into it and, instead of getting lost in its many splendors, finally rejoicing in - and joining forces with - its underlying oneness. Rumi's vision of the ultimate unity of all things, especially of Islamic, Judeo-Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist thought, speaks to our own fragmented age, and these spirited versions render his search for peace as exhilarating as it is enlightening.

5. Top 40 by Brandon Brown (Roof Books)

Like the wavering foliage which inspired William Wordsworth's autobiographical epic, "America's Top 40 Countdown" is the catchy Beatrice of Brandon Brown's new book. Writing through the Top 40 pop songs on the chart of September 14, 2013, Brown's poems track the life of a song as it resounds through an organism. An organism who bathes, reads, writes, likes, fights, loves, hates, and fucks seems human; the soundtrack never stops.

6. Becoming the Virgin by taylor jacob pate (Action Books)

Simultaneously enchanting and brutal, taylor jacob pate's debut book Becoming the Virgin is a work of desperate intensity. This series of interconnected confessional-cum-fairy-tale poems whisk the reader along at a breakneck pace. pate's language is at once hard and gem-like, exquisitely ornate, and succinctly muscular. The text oscillates from spellbinding beauty and wonder to undercurrents of uncontrollable violence, passion, pain, and melee. It travels the fluxes between self and creature. It loses itself in dark forests of language: branches in which we all become entangled.

7. THEME & VERSION: Plath & Ronsard by Sylvia Plath (Menard)

Formerly unpublished translations of Ronsard by Sylvia Plath. Essays about Ronsard by Yves Bonnefoy, Audrey Jones, Daniel Weissbort. According to the internet, Sylvia Plath is one of Madonna's favorite poets. This translation is a great and exciting way to engage with Plath's work. Ronsard was considered the "prince of poets" and Madonna is the queen of pop. An obvious must-read for Madonna fans. 

8. Popular Music by Kelly Schirmann (Black Ocean)

A meditation on messages, Popular Music asks: how does art make itself heard? The poems of Kelly Schirmann's debut full-length collection offer a unique voice, investigating the spaces between-between the singer and the audience; the lyrics and the message. Like a pop song, these poems encourage and distract, inviting the reader and listener in, wanting to tell you things that seem intimate, while telling them to everyone. They want to know: is anyone listening? And reader, we hope you are.

Happy reading!

All #SPDhandpicked books are 20% off all month w/ code HANDPICKED