Great news! The latest issue of The Laurel Review is about to drop, and it amounts to a new anthology of the contemporary prose poem, edited by the redoubtable John Gallaher. Nin Andrews! Maxine Chernoff! Dan Coffey! My Lake Forest College colleague Joshua Corey! Arielle Greenberg! Kate Greenstreet! Piotr Gwiazda! Philip Metres! Craig Morgan Teicher! Keith Tuma! G.C. Waldrep! And many more!
Included in this embarrassment of riches are two prose poems of my own, "Leopards in the Temple" and "The Ball Rider," both from a larger series called "The Kafka Sutra" (which lends its title to the book of my poems coming out later this year, The Kafka Sutra, from MadHat Press). The premise of "The Kafka Sutra" is simple: what if Kafka had written the Kama Sutra? It's a kind of détournement or rewriting of a number of Kafka's parables and stories (here, "Leopards in the Temple" and "The Bucket Rider") to make them into instructions for sexual pleasure. Or, since this is Kafka we're talking about, sexual frustration. Here are some from the series, published a while ago in The Cultural Society, with accompanying images by Sarah Conner.