Koss Works
Writing | Poetry | Art
Looking forward to this new book by Lannie Stabile (a queer Michigan writer) called Good Morning to Everyone Except Men Who Name Their Dogs Zeus from Cephalopress Books. It looks like an interesting blend of feminism and Greek mythology as seen through Lannie’s acute and personal lens. Will be updating this page once I have a copy in my hot hands to read. Oh, I can’t not mention I am blessed to have a Leda Cartoon in here too (thank you Lannie). More soon.
Very honored to have two poems in Feral Poetry this month. One is a sort of zuihitsu abecedarian and the other is about suicide and shaming. Too much going on to make photos for now, unfortunately. Here are the links, however, and there’s lots of other interesting work. Feral is a newer feminist-leaning hip journal made with love. Five for and Through the Body’s Bramble.
Happy to have five poems in Dreich Magazine (I believe the official name is now the Dreich Quarterly Review). They have changed dramatically since sending them a year or so ago, but happy to have different versions of Max poems sprinkled like ashes throughout the galaxy. “Max’s Bedroom” is an American sonnet about the aftermath of death. It later was reduced (and is no longer a sonnet). Writing is about attachment in so many ways . . . The process . . . The letting go . . .
Dreich, edited by Jack Caradoc, is a newly resurrected print journal from Scotland, and produces “bus-stop” or pamphlet-style quarterly journals and poet-dedicated pamphlets (we call them chapbooks in the U.S.). They are also putting out anthologies. Some of their issues appear to be available for viewing on Issuu. If you’re looking for their site, here it is.
And no, you’re not imagining it crooked. It’s late. I won’t offend any gods with perfection tonight or ever. “Without You” also got cut later, but I am attached to the “chopped up hair,” and glad it is here, chopped up . . . Max knows what it means. And I write, also, to the dead. “Headache” is about neuralgia and the “god’s mouth” or “mouth of god” is a reference I once found when studying acuppressure and marma points (Ayurveda), which basically refers to the atlas, which must be angled properly in order for your brain to properly function.
Pleasantly surprised to find my poem, “My Therapist Sez” was featured on Diode Poetry’s main page (along with an excerpt. It may disappear by the time you find this, so here’s the link to the entire poem. Patty Paine has been good to me and Diode is publishing some really great work in the journal (and in books and chapbooks).
Update: this poem won the 2021 Wergle Flomp Humor Award. Read about the contest on Winning Writer’s site. Listen to the poem on my audio page.
I published a Kafkaesque poem about the trauma of birth in Mom Egg Review #19. If you dig cockroaches and queer cowgirls, this is for you. Can’t share the whole poem yet but I might record it. You can buy the issue from the address shown in the graphic. Too busy to make my own poem album cover, but here is the Mom Egg Review one below. First, an excerpt:
“and you’re left alone in your existential freedom,
so mount Kafka’s cockroach, Gregor, and gallop happy,
butt-slung in black cowhide chaps, yee-hawing queerity
across the embarrassing town you were born in (Howell).”
Bye for now.
