Monday, October 26, 2009

What is Sean Lovelace reading?

The current featured contributor to Writers Read: Sean Lovelace, author of the recently released How Some People Like Their Eggs, winner of the Third Annual Rose Metal Press Short Short Chapbook Contest.

His entry begins:
I am mostly reading three things at once these days—I switch off/switch on, like maybe a giant firefly, or a dog fight. Since it’s autumn now, I am reading things that I can easily flip through, fold up, hold in my gloves as I sit in a tree about 30 feet above a lowland forest of dappling sun/shifting leaf-shadows/winding trails of deer and cats (been seeing several cats recently—not sure why) and coyotes and raccoons and one time this girl walked under my stand with a white dog, and she must have had That Feeling, so looked up at me—crouched in full camo off a tulip poplar in a metal appendage like some form of Orwellian insect/spy—and I waved my paw and she waved her paw (white glove with a tiny pink bell sown on) and walked off with her white dog, sort of drifted off...me thinking, Was that real, or a wood sprite, or God?

So, anyway, books-I-am-reading while bowhunting.

1.) Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas.

This post-apocalyptic mind-funk of mud and muck and seepage and musty moss head-crunch, seep, moil your spleen into crush-cakes, etc. is an excellent read for the deer stand. Why? It looks like a burnt piece of toast. Or toast clasped too tightly in a desperate mother’s hand, then burnt in the toaster, then drenched in cheap lipstick and regret, then re-burnt (like refried, only different), then flung and forgotten in a rain gutter full of tears for six months. Seriously. The book is black cover on black pages on soot. So no sunlight prisms off, no whitetail deer perceives me carefully flip the pages. I am about halfway through this book; it is horrifying and depressing so far. But then the language uplifts me. Kind of like...[read on]
Visit Sean Lovelace's blog.

Writers Read: Sean Lovelace.

--Marshal Zeringue