One of our six Pushcart nominations, Ocean Vuong’s “Self-Portrait with Exit Wounds,” has won a Pushcart Prize and will be featured in the next Pushcart anthology. The poem first appeared in ASSARACUS ISSUE 08. Congratulations, Ocean!
The Talking Day by Michael Klein
Fire Island, Bette Davis, reincarnation, the movies, Henry James, the Russian baths, being lonely in public, following strangers, washing a corpse, the FDR Drive and the racetrack all figure predominantly in Michael Klein’s The Talking Day – a talking book of poems that speak to the terrible beauty of the world we live in and the world we live without. “I’m dumb about the world. To me, it always looks haunted” is the first line of the first poem in this book and by the end, that haunting has turned fear into grace.
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The Talking Day by Michael Klein
Retail Price: $14.95; 70 Pages; Perfect-Bound 6 x 9
Publication Date: January 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-937420-27-7
THE TALKING DAY REVIEWED ON HUFFINGTON POST
“This is a book of such modesty and greatness. Michael writes about the most private situation and warmly includes all its angles, and losses, boondoggles and altars. His subject is this: how I am inside my life. There’s something notebook-y here too which is how the book is elegant. The flow is approximate. Anything can happen ‘in’ here because that’s how it feels to be alive in an uncharted and open world.”
– Eileen Myles, author of Inferno: A Poet’s Novel
“Michael Klein’s poems in The Talking Day are not from this planet. Somehow, something brought Michael Klein and his “heartbroken electric eye” onto our “rented star,” transforming us into something alien and even more curiously human. These poems show Klein, in equal measure, to be a guru, philosopher, salesman, quack, astronaut, wordsmith, and finally a perverse deity. He is one of my heroes.”
– Steve Fellner, author of Blind Date with Cavafy
“In what’s become an open-fire America, the notion of a “talking day” has taken on a searing aptness, and Klein employs it with an agile, able emphasis on restorative speech. In this welcome new volume, the poet combs his vibrant dream life for clues and epiphanies and sifts though his family history and at-times rambunctious youthful past with a ready-or-not candor and compassion. Klein’s verse always feels very lived-in, very close to the bone, yet captivating—without the scrim of heaviness or histrionics often associated with confessional poetry; staunchly humane, graced with an un-embittered survivor’s hard-won wisdom, his poems are riveting, true, and buoyant.”
– Cyrus Cassells, author of The Crossed-Out Swastika
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MICHAEL KLEIN’s previous poetry collections are then, we were still living, a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and 1990, which tied with James Schuyler to win the award in 1993. His books of prose are Track Conditions, a memoir, and The End of Being Known, essays. He lives in New York City and Provincetown, Massachusetts.
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MICHAEL KLEIN on the COVER: “This is a photograph my brother took of Bruce Waite, his best friend from college. I found it among my brother’s papers after he died. And then two weeks after that, Bruce died after a walk in the woods of a heart attack. He was young. I think of this picture as a kind of tribute to both of them — and I think it’s another interpretation of the title: A talking day that has nothing to say except the human body in a sort of magical, graceful form.”
KLEIN READINGS 2013
February 1, 2013 – Pete’s Candy Store
709 Lorimer Street
Brooklyn, NY
7:00 PM
w/Steven Cramer
February 6, 2013 – White Swallow Reading Series
Cornelia Street Café
New York, NY
6:00 PM
w/Christopher Bram and Steven Cramer
February 11, 2013 – Blacksmith House
42 Brattle Street
Cambridge, MA
8:00 PM
w/Rebecca Givens Roland
February 13, 2013 – NYU Bookstore
New York, NY
6:30 PM
w/Eileen Myles, Owen Lewis, Tina Chang
March 7, 2013 – AWP Offsite – Queertopia Reading
Boston, MA
March 14, 2013 – Poets House
New York, NY
6:00 PM
w/Matthew Dickman
March 28, 2013 – Monroe Community College
Rochester, NY
7:30 PM
April 3, 2013 – Labyrinth Books
Princeton, NJ
6:00 PM
April 13, 2013 - Rainbow Book Fair
New York, NY
w/Collin Kelley, Nic Destino, Dustin Brookshire
April 29, 2013 – KGB
New York, NY
7:00 PM
w/ Will Schutt
May 14, 2013 – The New School
New York, NY
6:00 PM
June 13, 2013 - Bureau of General Studies Queer Division
w/Adam Fitzgerald and Benjamin Grossberg
7:00 PM
July 9, 2013 – Bryant Park Reading Series
New York, NY
6:00 PM
w/Susan Wheeler, Saeed Jones, Angelo Nikolopoulos
September 15, 2013 – Brookline Public Library
Brookline, MA
2:00PM
w/Steven Cramer
October 8, 2013 - 36th Annual Old Dominion University Literary Festival
Norfolk, Virginia
2:30PM
October 11, 2013 – Chapter and Verse
Jamaica Plain, MA
7:30PM
w/Steven Cramer
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Leave A Comment ↓
Oh, how those plates do stack up! That strange showcase! Every pain finite! Tossed out of a bar for no reason! Love, MK, like all!
—Jeff He writes some good poems!!!