Barrelhouse is proud to announce that this fall we will publish a new collection of poetry, daryl hall is my boyfriend by erica lewis!
Selected from among the nearly 400 manuscripts submitted to our open reading period, each poem in daryl hall is my boyfriend takes its title from a line of a Hall & Oates song. The poems here are not “about” Hall and Oates songs or what they “mean,” but rather what is triggered when listening to or thinking about the music, those feelings, experiences, and memories, that specific nostalgia attached only to the sort of pop music Hall and Oates created.
What happens when you take something like a pop song and turn it in on itself, give it a different relevance or frame of reference, juxtapose the work against itself, against other pop music, bring it into the present, experience it in a different way?
This book is a new revising of the confessional. It's about having to grow up, about those feelings we want to get back to, the people we want to get back, the people we’ve had to let go. Humor, love, and responsibility.
Advance Praise for daryl hall is my boyfriend
I am so fascinated by daryl hall is my boyfriend. The sense it conveys of multiple kinds of subjectivities--an intimate subjectivity, like the "I" we feel we wake up with everyday, and our many layered, varyingly coopted subjectivities, of which we come in and out of awareness, reflected through pop music or even just through other people. I'm also taken with the meditative tone, a sort of looking backward not in order to gain any particular inspiration for moving forward, but just to sort of say, "huh, how did I get here?" which has in it both qualities of despair and wonder.
Sometimes a you is speaking to me, sometimes a "you" is speaking to me, and sometimes a voice is just performing speech. Sometimes I'm reading poetry and sometimes I'm reading "poetry" and sometimes I'm literally reading pop music! I've never read anything quite like it--quite an accomplishment.
- Allison Cobb, author of Born2 (Chax Press) and Green-Wood (Factory School)
About erica lewis
erica lewis lives in San Francisco where she is a fine arts publicist and curates the john oates house reading series. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in various anthologies and journals including, Apartment, BOMB, Bombay Gin, Boog City, The Brooklyn Rail, Clinic, Coconut, Dusie, Entropy, Little Red Leaves, New American Writing, Octopus, Sink, and The New Megaphone, among others. Books include the precipice of jupiter (Queue Books) and camera obscura (BlazeVox Books), both collaborations with artist Mark Stephen Finein, and the solo project murmur in the inventory (Shearsman Books). A chapbook is forthcoming in April 2015 from Ypolita Press and a double chap is forthcoming from Lame House Press in fall 2015. She was born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Read erica's poems online at:
• Entropy
• Brooklyn Rail
• BOMB
• Clinic