Exquisite Craps

Exquisite Craps was published in the summer of 2010 and has been pretty much under the radar since then. I threw it together in an evening and an afternoon late last August. It's a collection of poems that the Washtenaw County Women's Poetry Collective and Casserole Society wrote together after The Feeling Is Mutual but before they all moved their separate ways away from Michigan (one stayed in Michigan, two are in Philly, one in SF, one in Warsaw).

I was going to try to assemble this chapbook myself, but it was only two days before my move across the country, so I was busy learning how to collapse the seats of my rental van into the floor of the van and stuff like that. I caved and took the manuscript to the copy shop and they did a nice job. There are some excellent poems in here. There's a small typo on the last page. The cover is an exquisite corpse drawing we did of a teacher with a horse head throwing a curve ball.

Exquisite Craps was distributed at a party in Ann Arbor and that was about it. So, there are a good number of copies remaining. Please get in touch if you'd like one. It's a breezy yellow late-summer read.

-- Amy

Another belated post about a review of The Feeling Is Mutual

Tyler Gobble reviewed our book on his blog.

Here's an excerpt:

Moments like these abound in this collection, poems that pull on the edges of emotions before bringing the whole stack down. Like in the Retelling poem “The Odyssey: Color,” the poets take the familiar and connect it with emotions, new and bold. Just look:

I have to pretend that I miss my home,/that I miss my wife. My son/would certainly want me to miss him./ But out here on this boat things feel more infinite./The last tree I can see is not the last tree there is.

When I read those lines, I just blinked and blinked, like “What?” → “Woah” → “Wo-woah.” Yes, we have heard of longing, we have learned of the difficulties of space, but continued, continued, this poem does the length of the page, concluding “[b]efore Cyclops/I was a different guy—/my beard had no gray in it. But now/I know better than to account for color.”

While the emotions are familiar, yes we all feel them, the way these poets carve them into these words is just a glowing light. “The Space Between Stars” is one of those poems that hits you with ideas that are incredibly bold, emotional, purposeful. “Stars don’t shine bright, but they could always start/shining brighter” is cute and hopeful, okay, we get it. But then, it unfolds, unloads: “I spelled/your name wrong but I’m not sorry,/since you were kind of a dick/when you shout that clay pigeon I loved/and turned the rest loose in my aunt’s yard.” I’m thinking, HARSH BUT COOL. For real, think about the feeling, the dare-I-say-it fresh feeling here.

THE OLD HEAVE HO

Hello from Warszawa, where we've published the newest WCWPCCS publication,

The Old Heave Ho: Rejection Odes

Rejection Odes is a petite pink pamphlet printed in an edition of 50. Five pink poems about rejection.

Perhaps you would like to have one for yourself? This can be arranged. Contact thefeelingismutual@gmail.com.

Please enjoy an excerpt from our Rejection Ode to Love, "Dear Fighter" --

Fighter, why do we like what pigs bring to the party? Why, Fighter, do we go down and party like pigs? With great relief, with extreme sports, you will conquer ladies except me.

Belated post about really nice review on HTMLGIANT

Sean Lovelace wrote a really fun-to-read and nice review of our chapbook. You can read it here.

Here is how he ends it:

I don’t know why I was green-eyed when I first saw this book, but I am now full of hot red pepper flakes and cold brass tokens and bonfires and ice-box pie and casserole left out and soapand goats and herons and malt liquor and FUCK YOU YOLK! and crumble equations and stars andblackberry bramble and cherry stems and spookles and I would sure like to share a Guinness with these women of the Washtenaw County Women’s Poetry Collective and Casserole Society. They would drink that Guinness, drink it well, and they would spin all kinds of stories, I can just tell. They are pretty amazing. These poems the same. They seem a way of living, or of trying to live:

I will dance until my legs don’t remember

how to make the non-dancing shape.

Well. Amen.

I hope it was fun to write, Sean!