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THE LOWDOWN
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LA Liminal by Becca Klaver
Kore Press (March 2010)
88 pages, 6x9" paperback
ISBN: 1-888553-37-5
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BUY IT
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1. Directly from Kore Press via PayPal (best!)
2. Ask your local independent bookstore to order it (second best!)
3. Amazon (easy!)
4. If you're going to AWP Denver, visit the Kore Press table!
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WHAT SOME FABULOUS POETS SAID
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This is LA: Didion's, West's, Chandler's -- but it is also Becca Klaver's now, a beautifully-earned poetic residence -- " ... the new city /fire on the asphalt, antics in the firmament". Who knew there were poems this cock-eyed brilliant and convincing ("skate punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal") to be written about our most spectacularly illusory City? Who knew Klaver was going to burn up Paradise with a full-blown literary style, like a rocket-hot Santa Ana? What a radiant, wickedly-liminal debut, what a star show of sheer talent: hip, lit, hallowed. —Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California
A skeptical fabulist with a penchant for “monomyths” and “mythovarnishes,” it is no surprise that one of Becca Klaver’s favorite descriptions of L.A. would be Baudrillard’s “a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions.” Klaver revels in the interstices between proportion and dimension, jerking the reader while shifting her gaze back and forth from screens of all kinds to the personal space she feistily stakes out. Of course she knows the two are inextricably entwined. As if in cinema’s perpetual present, the ghost of L.A. keeps popping up, haunting her debut collection and, fittingly, mesmerizing the reader into a languorous state of mind. —Mónica de la Torre
LA Liminal gives us bright, lively, playful poems, that know how to cross over and under thresholds, perspectives, and transitions. —Joanne Kyger
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REVIEW COPIES
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Kore Press has a limited number of review copies available. If you would be willing to review the book in a web or print publication, please email me!
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SAMPLE POEMS
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EXT. LOS ANGELES – NIGHT
Flip-flops scuff bar to pier, sawdust to moondust.
Skate-punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal.
No fares. I’m rolling on eight pink wheels
fame-walking, parading the promenade. A float.
Fountains shriek mutely. I’m swinging a bouquet
of boutique bags. Lycra and velour blend seamlessly.
Clash kinda cutely. What happens next
isn’t deus ex machina, it’s only spring break.
Bienvenidos a Cabo, Tijuana, Mil-ee-wauk-ay.
Flick my fingers in the water, unstick my toes
and head east, (s)tarred goddess from machine.
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA GOTHIC
The Mountain Goats
wherein California
rhymes with warn ya.
Gillian Welch & Nina Nastasia
sprung from Hollywood cement
singing down down dark.
Joan Didion, anthropologist,
structurologist, expat.
Her Maria forever sunbathing
beside one of
David Hockney’s pools
where bleached light
spares only edges.
David Lynch’s
drive through the hills.
Manderley’s soundstage.
Fisher & Sons Funeral Home.
Buffy Summers
slayed by the weight of
the world’s perfect metaphor,
high school as hellmouth.
YOU BET
paradise haunts me rattles
me nightly sticks its
invisible pins in my lips
as I lie sleeping and when
this sticky stellar
melancholy seizes my sides
I fête it pet it
prettyprettyprettypretty
inhaling mal de corazón
like the menthols I sucked
while palms arced absurdly
into the foreground of a scene
another away mine
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BOOK TRAILER
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how do u do?
ReplyDeleteYay, congrats Becca!!
ReplyDeleteLove the vid!
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