What's next.

Hi. I'm still here. I guess I had a busy week, or something. It took me a while to recover from the double dose of flu shots last Friday, but today I am finally feeling 100%. If I'm counting correctly, I got almost nine hours of sleep last night (not including some earlier, accidental driftings into dream land, wherein I had a very bizarre dream about carnival equipment driving down my street).

Last week was somewhat disrupted by my routine-smashing attraction to Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon, a book that seriously caused me to consider not eating or sleeping until it was done. In 2010 I have also read Lit by Mary Karr (I felt awful one night reading it with a glass of champagne), which was good but not casbah-rockingly so, and now I am reading The Weight of Heaven by Thrity Umrigar. I wish I could read poetry books for fun, too, but I can't. I spend too much time evaluating them, or I get way too into them.

Reading Ariel again this week, and Now You're the Enemy by James Allen Hall, both for my classes. I wish I could feel the same things I felt about Ariel when I first read it twenty (!) years ago.

If you haven't read this yet, what are you waiting for? I want it printed on a t-shirt. A lady-style t-shirt, of course.

This week was a big one for po-news, as Steve Kistulentz won the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award for The Luckless Age, and Gary McDowell won the Orphic Prize for American Amen. These are both spectacular manuscripts, and I am so excited that they've found such good homes. Congrats, fellows.

This is seriously cool. I'll be up in the next installment.

I'm back to sending poems out again. I even made a little (handwritten...sigh) chart and stuff. I can't move forward with my next project until I hear about some funding, but I hope I can still squeak some poems out. It feels gross not to be writing. I will be spending the afternoon with some of my favorite poet friends, though, so that is bound to energize me.

Oh, and I get to shop at Heinen's today for stuff for a delish dinner, and some of those wicked desserts they have. I wish Heinen's was closer.

I also wish that cats could vacuum up their own fur. What the heck.