REAL THING
let’s get coffees
in the wind
& feel better than this
in the future
missing this
will be better
than the real thing
Feed Me Weird Things
Lisa Rogal
October 2018
At once wise and silly, open and elusive, common and strange.
Brandon Brown
Feed Me Weird Things is about the importance of the unimportant: the quotidian, the overlooked, the natural world, the pain or beauty of longing, the persistence of uncertainty. With a voice at once irreverent and sincere, the poems enact meaning through attentiveness, ambiguity, and humor.
About the Author
Lisa Rogal is the author of Morning Ritual (United Artists Books), and the chapbook The New Realities (Third Floor Apartment Press). Her poems have appeared in Elderly, Visceral Brooklyn, Portable Boog Reader, Greetings, and Poems by Sunday, among other publications. A graduate of the MFA program at Long Island University, she currently teaches and lives in Sacramento, California.
Praise
Lisa Rogal’s lean lyrics offer a lounge-y positive capability that moves the needle on living intelligence. Quick but natural cuts, open and pleasant spaces, and gravity seem to draw down the line. “You can pretend/ there isn’t a longing/ that never ends”. Not that space is easy, or breathing, or feminine cosmology. In these poems oxygen leads the room and feeds perceptive space. “Quiet/ be very/ level/ with me”. Expert minimized attention to detail and complex emotion. “Attack of patient manner.” “I think in the space/ of the culture “. The reader is safe here, “she is my fucking friend”, and words are well used: “haven’t I/ been hankering”.
Edmund Berrigan
Lisa Rogal’s Feed Me Weird Things is a pleasurable existential crisis. I mean, she asks what is the place of pleasure in the cultural mess we are in, which robs us of (almost) every last bit of possible gratification, or makes pleasure an ominous, dumb thing. We can’t look at a river without wondering at our water supply. We can’t just sit and drink a cup of fucking orange juice when the real is so broken. And still, “I want it to repeat nobody / can get rid of pleasure.” While she asks these questions about the difficulties of experience, Rogal’s poems deliver the joyful squeeze of desire. Their short, slightly surreal, lyrical lines reveal an infectious delight in language, in freakishness, in making and grappling, in play.
Karen Weiser
Lisa Rogal’s poems in Feed Me Weird Things are so ordinary, like “I’m watching the rain / I’m cold wherever.” No, I take it back, they’re actually brash, like “I steal lines from teens like / I am their affectionate reaper.” Well, they’re both, and also bizarre, like “I used / to eat / the manes / of horses.” Yum! I love these short songs, somehow both sparse and yet overbrimming with feeling. Their contradictions are what make them move: the work is at once wise and silly, open and elusive, common and strange. That bossy title is undermined by what these poems do, which is feed us. And the food is weird.
Brandon Brown
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Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 32 pp, 4.5 x 7 in
Publication Date: October 01 2018
Distribution: Direct Only