Amber Nelson book half book A Minetta Gould

I am working hard, nose down, reading a manuscript of poems by Amber Nelson called "Your Trouble is Ballooning." It is so good, so rewarding, to wrap myself in the blanket of these whatsits. What initially grabbed me, and still mainly grabs me about the poems, is the sounds. Sounds are only part of poetry, and usually not enough to hold my attention, but in this case they are more than enough to get me to the next thing that is in poetry.

The next thing there isn't meaning, but a basic sense of humor about what comes out of the sounds and a format.that prioritizes sound. I am a meaning-centric poet lately (starting in about 2006, I guess), so I'm surprised that Publishing Genius has taken on this manuscript (ie. that I accepted it). Surprised, but grateful because every time I start digging into the poems, I feel like I'm getting an education. This might be the addition to the house of me that I was looking for.

Here's a random line:

It costs bigger to smile on streets of the
city of outrage than without any garbage at all.

There are bigger samples from the collection at H_NGM_N, and a note from Amber about their form and composition.

These poems will be 1/2 of a split-side book, shared with A. Minetta Gould. The way the book came about was that I met Gould at a Hobart reading last may and she sent me some of her poems which I think it turns out I had already read in Caketrain. It was a chapbook and I was looking to do a split side chapbook like one I'd seen done by Chris Toll and Buck Downs, where both sides were the front cover. So Ashley sent me some other chapbook length manuscripts from her pals and I read them and went camping with my family last summer and while camping read Amber's and decided that was the one (because of all the sounds, like I said above).

So yeah. I just saw the cover art for this project, too -- it's by Kelly Packer. Things is coming together and I hope that when this book comes out, it will make a new sort of sense to readers like me.