Jason Kirk's Blog: Chthonian, Inc.

TODAY MARKS THE OFFICIAL RELEASE of WA129, a new poetry anthology edited by Washington State Poet Laureate Tod Marshal and published by Sage Hill Press. To commemorate Washington's 129th year, the collection includes poems by 129 poets from our great state, including Sherman Alexie, Tom Robbins, Heather McHugh, yours truly, and many more. That's some pretty luminous company for me. (In fact it's a testament to the limits of my imagination that I'd never even dared to dream of appearing in the same volume as Heather McHugh.)

My own contribution is "Olympic Harvest," a sequence of nine haiku that loosely traces a trip from Seattle to the Olympic rain forest during one long spring evening.

I'm told the book is available at Elliott Bay Book Company -- which I'll verify this weekend -- and it's definitely available at Amazon (http://ow.ly/6fag30aRKXl), though I'm sure it will be available more widely soon.

Meanwhile, many thanks to Tod Marshal for choosing to include my work, and to Sage Hill Press, Humanities Washington, and the Washington State Arts Commission for supporting the project.

Happy National Poetry Month, good people!

Join me online tonight for 90 minutes of live, non-partisan haiku to accompany the third and final 2016 Presidential Debate (9pm EDT, 6pm PDT). Tell your friends, post your own haiku, or just follow along for an alternative to the usual news coverage, delivered 17 syllables at a time.

facebook.com/events/1547437058615490
twitter.com/hashtag/HaikuTheDebate

POETRY READING in Brooklyn on 4/20. Join me? Tell your friends and family in NYC? Intrepids welcome!

Readings by Tongo Eisen-Martin, erica lewis, Morgan Parker, Jason Kirk.

Born in San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker, educator, and poet who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He is the author of "someone's dead already" 2015. He uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.

erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she is a fine arts publicist and curates the john oates house reading series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and journals. Recent chapbooks include publications from Ypolita Press and Lame House Press; chapbooks are forthcoming in 2016 from Belladonna, Lark Press, and After Hours/The Song Cave. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Morgan Parker is the author of Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night (Switchback Books 2015), selected by Eileen Myles for the 2013 Gatewood Prize, and There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce, forthcoming from Tin House Books in 2017. Morgan is Cave Canem graduate fellow, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and poetry editor for The Offing.

Jason Kirk is the author of A Fabulous Hag in Purple on the Moor, The Other Whites in South Africa, and Reverb, as well as the composer of The Mirror of Simple Souls, an opera collaboration with librettist and poet Anne Carson. His most recent publication is a narrative poem about a wheelchair-bound mermaid who works in an adult-video store in Southern California, which appears in the story anthology Phantasma.

I’ll be “headlining” an evening of poetry and music, set amidst an art exhibition, in Seattle tomorrow. The event will be the first in a new monthly series taking place at Cuddle Club in West Seattle. It’s free, and it includes beer and wine. Doors are open from 6-10pm, performance run from 7-9pm, and I’ll be reading at 8:30pm. As well, proceeds from donations and sales of the art will be used to buy toothbrushes, deodorant, and the like for “survival packs” that will then be distributed to local homeless folks.

What: Art, Music and Poetry Night
Where: Cuddle Club, 6417 Fauntleroy Way SW, Seattle, 98136 (West Seattle, map)
When: Saturday, February 20, 6-10pm
Why: Benefit for local homeless folks

Facebook event: http://www.facebook.com/events/238621...
Venue website: http://www.cuddleclubseattle.com/

This eclectic volume of six stories has been in the works for months, and I'm pleased to share at last that I'll be in the esteemed company of Anne Charnock, J.D. Horn, Kate Maruyama, Jodi McIsaas, and Roberta Trahan as a contributor to this intrepid collection.

Roberta Trahan's "Undercurrents" features a young woman who discovers that her migraines are a symptom of something more sinister than what a good lie-down in a dark room can cure.

Jodi McIsaac's "Pro Patria Mori" asks whether, when an Irish soldier encounters fairies who offer magical aid, that magic will help save those he holds dearest?

In Kate Maruyama's "Akiko," a curse laid in Japan finds its mark in the City of Angels.

Anne Charnock's "The Adoption" explores a new age of sexual equality and reproductive freedom, when bio-engineered foetuses are gestated in artificial wombs. What becomes of tomorrow’s orphans?

Set in rural Georgia in the 1950s, J.D. Horn's "Pitch" tells the tale of a goat-faced boy who sets out with a rifle to kill his father, the Devil.

My own contribution is a story in verse, "The Guardian of the Sea," starring a wheelchair-bound mermaid who lives in Southern California and works at an adult-video store.

I could hardly be more excited to join these five authors, as welcoming a set of speculative storytellers as one could hope to share pages with.

The book releases on September 22, but you can pre-order now.

Find out more here: http://ow.ly/RwrNB

‪#‎PhantasmaStories‬

I'm very pleased to share the good word that my new volume of poems has been published at last. "A Fabulous Hag in Purple on the Moor" is actually one long poem from a book-length collection tentatively entitled "Women in Wheelchairs." This hand-made chapbook is now available on Etsy from Bitterzoet Press, with a custom design printed on fine Mohawk paper and black cardstock.

"I structured Jason's poems into a pop-out format because Jason's poems pop. They have an energy to them that is hard to miss because it will sometimes, oftentimes, try to punch you in the face. Thus, when you open the stark black covers of this little bonbon, the poem will pop forward in order to invite the reader to participate in the high action of these poems." ~Pattie Flint, Editor

Check it out: http://www.etsy.com/listing/237198586

To toast the launch of Camille Griep's debut novel, Letters to Zell , join me at the Rumpus Room, upstairs at Lunchbox Laboratory in South Lake Union, on July 11. We'll have food and drinks, singing and dancing, books for sale, books to give away, contests, prizes, and guest readers presenting their epistolary work. (I'll be reading poems from Reverb .)

When: Saturday, July 11, 2015, 5:00 PM
Where: Lunchbox Laboratory, 1253 Thomas St., Seattle, WA, United States 98109

See you there!

Reviewed, revised, rehearsed, and ready! Join me, Brent Armendinger, and Julia Clare Tillinghast tonight for an evening of poetry put on by Seattle Poetics Lab at Vermillion Art Gallery and Wine Bar in Capitol Hill.

SEATTLE POETICS LAB PRESENTS
Saturday, February 21, 6pm
Vermillion Art Gallery and Bar
1508 11th Ave, Capitol Hill

In half an hour, I'll be talking about some of the year's best SF books as part of a live stream here. Tune in! http://ow.ly/FZVXB

This week saw the release of Christopher Rice's "The Vines," a supernatural thriller that I had a hand in editing. From this point forward, my contribution will be memorialized in the book's acknowledgements. To wit: "My thanks to Jason Kirk, for spearheading the editorial process (and helping me come up with synonyms for the word 'slut,' a word this novel was apparently full of when I first turned it in)." Don't worry. I won't rest on my laurels...

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Paperback: http://ow.ly/DhLu5
Kindle: http://ow.ly/DhLG0