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| I often return to an inn where, instead of Gideon's Bible, copies of Leaves of Grass are in each room. I submit that CAConrad's Deviant Propulsion, with its sculpted, condensed stanzas of rare, high-spirited outpourings be slated for immediate worldwide bedside table distribution. Then we'd get something done around here! A fly just landed on this stanza and showed it to me anew: 'it is / just / so.' —Lee Ann Brown |
| "Conrad is the poet who, putting aside the heart cliche, gives you all of his liver--the organ that filters out evils--offering through poems (and want-ads) the pink, frilly, faggy clip to the chin of oppression! I think of Philly, among other things, when I think of Conrad, as he gets that city's flavors into the letters of his poems, and I think of tenderness: in these days of rage only Conrad will offer the President of the U.S. the chance to wind down in the woods and paint secret mud symbols on our naked bodies Heres a poet who knows 'the only/ failure/ is no/ love.'" —Anselm Berrigan |
| I'm a huge fan of CAConrad's poems--he's Gay Sunshine anew. Plus George Herbert & Harold Norse, Creeley and early Judy Grahn. Soupy Sales too! His fairy love poem to George W. Bush should be read aloud to every high school assembly in the world. Watch out, I think he has an agenda! CAConrad is boldly recruiting all of us to commit the/muscle/ to love. Is the opposite of a hate crime a love crime? Well, this is it. —Eileen Myles |
| Sexy and outrageous, Conrad's debut fuses the confidence of the beats and the casual demeanor of more recent downtown New York performance poetry into short lines, exclamations and admonishments. Conrad's sentences can include a whimsy bordering on randomness: "It's True I Tell Ya My Father Is a 50 Cent Party Balloon," one title insists. He can also turn suddenly profound: "all the/ death has a/ way of/ getting us/ the love." If the specter of HIV looms heavily, it does battle with the happier spirit of Stonewall: Conrad imagines a "transvestite boxer... willing to wear pink gloves with drawings of Judy Garland's face" punching out Mike Tyson, and portrays himself "in a bishop's robe bless[ing] rush hour traffic with one hand, with a sign in the other 'IGNORE THIS BLESSING YOU HAVE ALL YOU NEED!' " Though he invokes celebrities and poetic mentors from Robert Creeley to Kevin Killian to Courtney Love, the best analogy for the Philadelphia-based Conrad is Allen Ginsberg, who also shocked America with his frankness, denounced hypocrisy in prose poems and in verse declamation, and who also hoped to embody the queer life of his times. —Publishers Weekly |
| CAConrad takes up the old poetic task of giving us a picture of a world, a time, a place, in all the particulars of the moment. These poems are now brilliantly tough, now jaw-droppingly romantic, witty, outraged, yearning, and often unabashedly lovely. With a clarity of language that makes the bones sing, they sneak past our defenses and do things, directly, surprisingly, irreparably, to us. 'You won't believe the difference a poet can make,' testifies this later-day Francois Villon, midway through his pages. Well, by the last, you will. Here's a poet willing to take up the task of doing 'the living spirit dance around the deep fat fryer.' Here's a celebration, diamond hard, of the day with all its deepest feelings, and of such feelings' wonderful place in the everyday. —Samuel R. Delany | |
Deviant Propulsion
CAConrad
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| Paper | 5.5" x 7.5" | 150 pgs. | ISBN: 1-932360-87-5 | List: $13.95 | 04/1/2006 |
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
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About the book: CAConrad's poems vibrate with the flamboyant desire that manifests itself in queer culture, where the right to act on basic desires can become a battleground, and everyday acts of love and devotion must be enacted as a political form of defiance. The poems that emerge from this life long struggle illustrate the sharp edge of that defiance and desire, where joy is closely linked to death. In a world ruled by those who govern with fear, and in a landscape barbed with those who are terrified of desire, moving at speed of deviants is the only way to transform potential into action, and desire into positive change.
About the author: CAConrad's childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He escaped to Philadelphia the first chance he got, where he lives and writes today with the PhillySound poets (www.phillysound.blogspot.com). He coedits FREQUENCY Audio Journal with Magdalena Zurawski, and edits the 9for9 project. He has two forthcoming books, The Frank Poems (Jargon Society) and advancedELVIScourse (Buck Downs Books). He is the author of several chapbooks, including (end-begin w/chants), a collaboration with Frank Sherlock. Deviant Propulsion is his first book.
From the book:
some mornings your hair is EXACTLY the way you want it when you wake up and you don't shower to not mess it and you want the trees of Philadelphia to smell EXACTLY who you are sweat and semen of your lover MY GOD IT'S BEAUTIFUL OUT HERE it feels good until it feels superficial then you feel guilty and if you are lucky you stop . . . understand guilt as someone else's idea AND YOU GET THE love again
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IMBIBE
I've never played
violin never touched
one till now
how did I convince
them my god the place
is packed balconies even
I walk out how am
I doing
(applause applause)
I could run off
I could tell them
I could stare laugh
cry fall over
I could faint
"Violinist faints
every evening and
Sunday matinees"
how do you die when
you really need to
instead
I lift my bow
play Vivaldi
and wonder how it is
I came to surrender
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FOR STRAIGHT GUYS WHO'VE CONSIDERED SUICIDE WHEN THE K-Y IS ENOUGH
are you worried I want you?
are you worried I jerk off
picturing you
naked
touching me?
swallowing me?
yeah
maybe I do
maybe I think about you
everynight
and there's nothing you can do about it
and I tie you down
maybe you spread your ass cheeks
maybe you beg for more
and I smack you around
yeah
maybe I paint your nails
dress you in rubber
cuff you
drive you in your own car
places you never
wanted to go
maybe I push the car off a cliff
wave bye-bye as you scream at the back window
maybe I roll you in shit
take your pants off
let my horney german shepard take a crack
maybe I've always
hated you more
maybe you had no idea
what an angry faggot
could do
yeah
maybe you ain't so good in bed
as you brag either
maybe you last a good 2
maybe 3 minutes
a bit too excited
runny nose
and all
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