mountains before mountains were mothers

The first time I was ever published was about twenty years ago and it was by a small press called Butcher Shop Press which published a chapbook of my poems. Butcher Shop Press encouraged me to keep writing and I will forever be thankful to all the wonderful small presses which followed who have supported my work. These presses and the editors who work tirelessly to keep them up are such an important part of the writing and reading community. They aren’t looking to be millionaires or thousandaires or even hundredaires. They publish the work of others to encourage writers and allow their words to spread. My books have all been published by independent presses and in this extremely difficult time, I only hope we as readers and writers can continue to support them. Thank you to BlazeVOX books, great weather for MEDIA, and Three Rooms Press who have supported my words enough to publish me!

Speaking of excellent presses, hard-working editors and great journals…..Thank you so much to the Cream City Review journal for publishing my poem (and asking me to read it as well!). mountains before mountains were mothers was Runner-Up of the 2019 Poetry Prize selected by Aimee Nezhukumatathil!

 

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN!

 

birth day.

It is difficult to say when a poem is born. Thinking is a part of the writing process and I am always thinking and stewing and marinating in jumbles of words.

One year ago today I gave birth to the biggest puddle of words, pushing them out into a carefully constructed, bound and ISBN’d book.

to go without blinking was published by BlazeVOX books in March 2012. After collecting forms, stories, voices, echoes and various translations from numerous bodies, I created a narrative out of the webs of disjointed stanzas.

Over a decade ago, I started sending out my work. Mostly poems, but some stories too. In those days, you sent out pages in an envelope with a SASE (self addressed stamped envelope) inside. I began filling a lime green folder with rejection letters, which traveled in the envelopes I addressed. Most were form rejections: an insertion of my name cut and pasted to memorized NO, THANK YOUs. Sometimes, they came back a little more personalized.

These days, most submissions are through the computer. And you wait. And you wait. That green folder busted loose, ripping at the folds. But it needed to grow fat in order to reach the moment of YES’s.

As writers, we let go the moment we hand our work to someone else: reader or editor or publisher or mother. With this book, I have enjoyed hearing from readers– their interpretations and questions. What it meant to them and how other people’s poetry can impregnate a reader’s body with swarms of more poems.

As a young writer, many many years ago, I dreamt of this moment. I used to go to bookstores and visit the section of poetry where my book would be alphabetized in. Perhaps beside Marilyn Hacker or Langston Hughes.

Calling myself writer is the one label I will proudly own for the rest of my life. Self-inflicted and permanently inked on body.

Friday, March 9th Performance @ Sidewalk Cafe, NYC

Boog City presents
d.a. levy lives: celebrating the renegade press

Fri., March 9, 7:00 p.m. FREE

Sidewalk Café
94 Ave. A, NYC
F/V to 2nd Ave., L to 1st Ave.
Venue is at E.6th St.

Event will be hosted by
BlazeVOX editor and publisher
Geoffrey Gatza

Featuring readings from

Geoffrey Gatza
Barbara Henning
Aimee Herman
Michael Kelleher
Krystal Languell

and music from

Christy Davis
Julie Delano & Gold
Leslie Graves

There will be wine, cheese, and crackers, too.

Poetry booked by Geoffrey Gatza, music booked by Christy Davis.

Curated and with an introduction by Boog City editor David Kirschenbaum

——

**BlazeVOX [books]
http://www.blazevox.org/

*Performer Bios*

Christy Davis has been playing drums in bands since the ’80s, spanning a wide variety of projects, including Reverend Billy & His Stop Shopping Choir, Rebecca Moore, Mold, and Kansas State Flower. Christy has recently been stepping out from behind the drum set to perform her own songs while still playing with her most recent collaborative effort Gatos de Sensei.

Geoffrey Gatza is the editor and publisher of the small press BlazeVOX. The fundamental mission of BlazeVOX is to disseminate poetry, through print and digital media, both within academic spheres and to society at large. Gatza has received awards from the Fund for Poetry and a Boomerang Award. He is the author of many books of poetry, including Secrets of my Prison House, Kenmore: Poem Unlimited, and Not So Fast Robespierre (Menendez Publishing). His writings for children includes HouseCat Kung Fu: Strange Poems for Wild Children, and Kindle books, A Rocket Full of Pie and The Diamond who wanted to be a Ruby. He is also the author of the yearly Thanksgiving Menu-Poem Series, a book length poetic tribute for prominent poets, now in it’s tenth year. He is a CIA trained chef, a former Marine, a lifelong Sherlockian, and an avid philatelist. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y. with his girlfriend and two beloved cats.

Julie Delano & Gold is the solo project of bassist, singer, and songwriter Julie DeLano. In this project she adds angelic and demonic harmonies and drum beats to her sparse songwriting.

Leslie Graves is the singer in They Would be Happy People, an improvisational art rock group at work on a new LP. She plays solo as well and released an album last year called Let it Take You.

Barbara Henning is the author of two novels, You, Me and the Insects and Black Lace. Her books of poetry include My Autobiography, Detective Sentences, Love Makes Thinking Dark, and Smoking in the Twilight Bar, as well as numerous chapbooks and a series of photo-poem pamphlets. A collection of prose and poetry, Cities & Memory, is forthcoming from Chax Press. She’s a native Detroiter and a long time New York City resident.

Aimee Herman, a queer performance poet, has been featured at various New York venues including the Happy Ending Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Perch Café, One & One Bar, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, Mike Geffner Presents: The Inspired Word, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, Sound Zine, Pregnant Moon Review, and/or journal, Polari Journal, and Sous Le Pavre. She can also be read in you say. say. and hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado LGBT Voices (Johnson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), Women in Lust (Cleis), and The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica (Cleis Press). She works as an erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn.

Michael Kelleher is the author of two collections of poems, both from BlazeVOX [books], Human Scale and To Be Sung. His poems and essays have appeared at the Poetry Foundation website, The Brooklyn Rail, Ecopoetics, The Poetry Project Newsletter, and others. With Ammiel Alcalay he runs OlsonNow, a project (events and a blog) dedicated to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson. He lives in Buffalo, N.Y., where he works as artistic director of Just Buffalo Literary Center.

Krystal Languell was a semi-finalist for the 2010 University of Akron Press Poetry Prize and a finalist for the 2011 National Poetry Series. Her work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Fairy Tale Review, and DIAGRAM among other journals, and was anthologized in the 2010 edition of Best of the Web. Founder of the feminist literary magazine Bone Bouquet, she serves as a collaborative board member for the Belladonna* Series as well as editor-in-chief at Noemi Press. She teaches composition at York College in Queens and the Borough of Manhattan Community College. She lives in Brooklyn, where she also co-curates the HOT TEXTS Reading Series.

JUST RELEASED!!!! to go without blinking

Aimee Herman is a cyborg. Not in the sense of a mixture but: in her impetus. Her desire for a book to be a new kind of thinking and being in the world. As she writes in the startling Statement of Poetics that opens this passionate collection: “This body of text practices trilingualism and contraction. Theories include gender confiscation and syntax dissection.” I liked that. A syntax that records what happens to a body even more than the words themselves. And that’s just page one. Throw away “the color pink,” writes Herman, deeper in. And: “Gender is best received in a question mark.” In not with. I loved that. This is re-wiring where it counts: below the lexicon. Below the public-private register:” where the label was rubbed.” Until there’s nothing left but, as the writer says: “The most dangerous parts of me.” What those “dangerous parts” become, reconfigured, mutilated and grown again, is the text of this “sore” and “feminine” book. A book in which “words” and beloveds, of various kinds: “never stop coming.” What kind of cyborg is this?

—Bhanu Kapil, The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Naropa University.

Gizzards: a word my grandmother used to mean bloody, messy, entangled innards. These are gizzard-poems. Even if the important parts are blurred you can hear the sound of envelopes unlatching, you can become the redhead body for a while. Herman tells us do not approach the scars…disobey her and masturbate while reading this book. Then go snap a pencil in half. Yes, it’s like that.

— Jackie Sheeler, author of Earthquake Came to Harlem

Aimee Herman celebrates and contradicts our expectations in her disturbing juxtapositions of unexpected images. This is a book poised to define the poet’s title and premise: “How can one edit the typos found in scar tissue.” Reading these poems challenges our comfort zone and confronts us with an ever-moving visceral vitality. The poet’s lyrical scrutiny considers all angles and actions as in the “shape of angled knuckles surfing into / independent variable”. She is breaking through taboos of language we never knew we had. Her tangled metaphors morph into surreal visions. Unpredictable, a sexuality of the unexpected that demands our engagement even as the language soaks us ever deeper into inexplicable non-outcomes that riddle like questions in a Zen koan. Experimental and disarmingly playful, these lines are a testimony, a political investigation into a sensuality that refuses conclusion.

— Maureen Owen, author of Erosion’s Pull

Aimee Herman writes so often in the imperative because she and her world insist on the NOW of the body, society, and language. She brings us the world both embodied and cataloged, alienated yet familiar. Her words are a recipe for seeing differently. Blink at your own delicious peril.

— Daphne Gottlieb, author of 15 Ways to Stay Alive

Aimee Herman’s to go without blinking is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates “sturdy retinas” in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here– not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page—it is body and page as planar path, “leaking teeth”—“a need to disrobe to satisfy.” Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book. We are conflated. We are ruined in the best possible ways. to go without blinking’s “tongue is too big for [its] body” and this is where its genius is.

—j/j hastain, author of prurient anarchic omnibus

Aimee Herman, a queer performance poet, has been featured at various New York venues such as the Happy Ending Lounge, Dixon Place, Wow Café Theatre, Perch Café, One & One Bar, Bowery Poetry Club, Public Assembly, and Sidewalk Café. She has performed at reading/performance series such as: In the Flesh erotic salon, Hyper Gender, Sideshow: Queer Literary Carnival, Mike Geffner Presents: The Inspired Word, and Red Umbrella Diaries. Her poetry can be found in Clean Sheets, Cliterature Journal, InStereo Press, Sound Zine, Pregnant Moon Review, and/or journal, Polari Journal, Mad Rush, Lavender Review, and Sous Le Pavre. She can also be read in you say. say. and hell strung and crooked (Uphook Press), Focus on the Fabulous: Colorado LGBT Voices (Johnson Books), Best Women’s Erotica 2010 (Cleis Press), Best Lesbian Love Stories 2010 (Alyson Books), Nice Girls, Naughty Sex (Seal), Women in Lust (Cleis) and The Harder She Comes: Butch Femme Erotica (Cleis Press). She currently works as an erotica editor for Oysters & Chocolate and curates/hosts monthly NYC erotica and GLBT lit readings. She can be found writing poems on her body in Brooklyn.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 156 pages


· Binding: Perfect-Bound


· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 


· ISBN: 978-1-60964-080-4

$16 Buy it from Amazon

Forthcoming Full Length Book of Poetry published by BlazeVOX Books

COMING SOON……..MARCH 2012…….A FULL LENGTH BOOK OF POETRY BY AIMEE HERMAN published by BlazeVOX Books

”]

to go without blinking features poems of all forms, experimenting with voice, content and structure. It is a journey through gender, sexual imprints, narration of memories, observation, life, love, lust and language.

For more info or to schedule Aimee Herman for a performance/reading at your reading series or in your town, contact Aimee @: aimeeherman@gmail.com

Aimee Herman’s to go without blinking is a visceral, wide eyed, queer movement that creates “sturdy retinas” in those of us who participate. As we enter and perform this book by way of our bodies (our inhabitation) we are nervy-aghast, gasping, slobbering, terrified, aroused. Oh the confessions here– not only the confessions themselves, but the quality of confession amid the varying grits of the unveiled body. This is not a book of the stellar body. It is the core, guttural relation of body to page—it is body and page as planar path, “leaking teeth”—“a need to disrobe to satisfy.” Herman has shown us an unabridged vista of spaces and scenes where power, colonization, detriments and desires are exchanged. Nothing is held back here. We are cut by this book. We are conflated. We are ruined in the best possible ways. to go without blinking’s “tongue is too big for [its] body” and this is where its genius is.

–j/j hastain, author of prurient anarchic omnibus