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“Elizabeth Skurnick’s poems do so many things—brutal in ways, there’s no nonsense here—and yet the poems are funny, snapped inside-out and flung out the car window funny. Her work is....full of the erotics of defeat smoldering in the fleshly renewals of human desire. None of this ever ends, Skurnick implies, and then we’re off on another furious ride through a menagerie landscape and then—zip—right up to a the counter of a soon-to-be product line of feminine friendly contraceptives. This poet crosses borders and makes it back home covered in soot, flinging buckets of catharsis. These poems are something else.” David Dodd Lee Elizabeth Skurnick’s manuscript “Check-In” was chosen by Jim Daniels as the winning entrant in the 2004 Caketrain Chapbook Competition. As such, it quickly became the first single-author title to be released from our press imprint. You will be shocked by just how new this verse feels, by the way formal canvases, as it turns out, bring anarchic modernity into razor-sharp and tactile relief. The cover features a slick photograph by Eliot Shepard; the pictured motel looks far more attractive here than it possibly could in reality. We are proud of this book to an extent that has reduced us to bouts of fanatical raving, much the chagrin of our families and closest associates, and do you know what? We don’t even care—it really is as good as all that. [click Check-In Observations My Husband is the Husband of Five Other Women My Husband is a State Trooper My Husband is a Broker at Bear, Stearns My Husband Was a Spokesman for the President Grand Central, Track 23 Last Rites Angel Eyes Six Men Sestina Tenants The Heart Morning Song Medusa in Oregon Wild Kingdom Chastity in Gomorrah Numbers Inside, Out The above recordings of “My Husband is the Husband of Five Other Women” and “My Husband is a Dermatologist” were excerpted from an interview with Elizabeth on Baltimore Public Radio WYPR’s The Signal. To score a recording of the complete interview, we encourage you to barter with an Old Hag. Acknowledgements Barrow Street: “My Husband is the Husband of Five Other Women,” “My Husband is a Broker at Bear, Stearns”; Shade: “Grand Central, Track 23,” “Mt. Desert Island,” “Tyringham, 1998,” “Wild Kingdom,” “Tenants,” “Angel Eyes,” and “Check-In”; The Iowa Review: “My Husband is a State Trooper,” “My Husband is a Dermatologist,” and “My Husband Was a Spokesman for the President”; The Delta Review: “Two Women”; The Ledge: “Six Men Sestina”; The Melic Review: “Chastity in Gomorrah,” “Persephone In Hades.” Text Copyright 2005 Elizabeth Skurnick. Hello Radio: In July 2006, Elizabeth appeared on WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast to read her poem “Wiretapping.” To ensure the safety and security of the homeland, we urge you to listen in. |
Caketrain is a literary journal and press based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our interest is in bringing you, reader, the very best in contemporary creative writing, full stop. Our goals are for each issue of our journal to submerge you in a birthing tank for gelatinous language monsters, young masses of tentacular foci undulating as directed (in all, at once) by our eclectic stable of contributors; for each new book to seduce and ensnare you, sometimes intangibly, always undeniably; and for you, reader, to be able to draw at least one passage from our banks that prods your mind with a precision and power that feels as if it was written for your eyes alone. To wit and to whet, here is a snippet, a slight nip of our delicious lit mix: New and Upcoming afterpastures, by Claire Hero Caketrain Issue 05 Loving 5_Trope, AGNI, Barrow Street, Believer, Black Warrior, Born, Bound Off, Caffeine Destiny, Canarium, Conjunctions, Controlled Burn, Diagram, Double Room, Drunken Boat, Elimae, FC2, Finishing Line, Fishouse, Flood, Found, Fringe, Frostproof, Future Tense, Ghoti, Harpur Palate, Hobart, Jubilat, Mad Hatters’, Many Mountains Moving, Mid-American, NewPages, New Yinzer, New York Tyrant, Nidus, Nightboat, Noon, Obscure, Parsifal, Pebble Lake, PENNsound, Pudding House, Quick Fiction, Rattapallax, Redactions, Salt, SleepingFish, Spinning Jenny, Starcherone, Steel City Review, Titular, Ubu, Unicorn Mountain, Unsaid, Web del Sol Mourning 3rd Bed, Alterran, Deek, Melic, Press 62
Copyright 2003-2008 Caketrain Journal and Press. Rights to individual works revert to their respective creators. ISSN 1547-6839. How’s Our Driving? Into Befriending Trains? Hosting by Doteasy |
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to hear the author read from the book]