My chapbook, “Diaspora of Things,” will be coming out in a few weeks. It’s been a while since my last brush with the publishing world. Poets warned that I wouldn’t have much control. It would be the equivalent of “making a birth plan” – we know how that works out!
The one thing I would have full control over: self-promotion and marketing. Ugh. For someone who entertains highbrow ideas such as “what is the self?” and “does the self even exist?” – that’s a curious mode. But I went about it in a workaday way, emailing contacts and writing draft after draft about myself and the appeal of my work. Getting a slew of pre-orders and organizing email lists and making graphics with ground zero of experience.
Oh, little self in a big chair. One day in this glorious phase of book publishing, the brain got tired, the energy dried up and I got stuck in a weird paralysis about the simplest of announcements.
Child’s play to some, it had to be done, it couldn’t be done. The swirling began. Cloudy, impenetrable thoughts hovered for hours (in retrospect, like a poem) before a figure came from the shadows: a younger self. Of course she would show up! Self-conscious, defiantly private. Mortally conflicted about bragging and showing off. I’d thought the anxieties of that introvert had been talked through ad nauseum. Placate her and give the girl a lollipop!
But of course, selves don’t disappear, they crouch and get layered and hang behind other selves. This shouldn’t have been strange to me as “Diaspora of Things” revolves around these very themes. Narratively the book is about the dismantling of a family home and negotiating of relationships, it also understands the self as one of those things which is unfixed, wavering as it undergoes experiences, part of a larger ecosystem of things possessed and dispossessed. As the speaker assesses, she is re-assessed; as she feels, she is felt.
Liberations happen; worlds open and flutter and evolve, carrying along their traces. So the book continues to evolve past its fixed state. Fresh voices arise. Oh, and by the way: “Diaspora of Things” will be launched in a few weeks. Check it out!
Diaspora of Things, Finishing Line Press, https://www.finishinglinepress.com