February marks my Bay Area first year anniversary. How else to mark the occasion but to produce art? Breaking Up With Los Angeles is my new poetry chapbook. The title is excessive. It marks a leaving behind or the habitual haunting. I imagine my absence in the many faces of Los Angeles, as well as the many faces in Los Angeles.
this is what D.I.Y. looks like...
I am hoping to move beyond the banality of crankiness; beyond not knowing what kind of neighborhood you live in or where to get the best tortillas and donuts and tire service. This is not a maudlin turn about the loss of creature comforts. This project is simply the receptacle for the ache alongside the rainbow of anxieties that are symptoms and by-products of leaving home. Loss, abandonment, and other ugly feelings have eclipsed most hangovers this past year and instead of taking it out on my loved ones or consuming my identity I turn to self-production.
Luckily, there is a place for these less than desirable inhabitable soul-crushers. That place is poetry. Poetry has always functioned as a site of no rules. It is the harm reduction that goes well with the abandonment of a lover; friendships; spatial identification. No permission. A small holder of my psychic messes. A document. A textual object.
Or an embrace for when all other embraces fail to keep me safe.