You're Going to Miss Me When You're Bored, by Justin Marks
You're Going to Miss Me When You're Bored, by Justin Marks
The poems in You’re Going To Miss Me When You’re Bored integrate the sublime and the mundane, the destined and the happenstance, the dire meaningfulness of the moment and the absurd lack of consequence in the infinity. In some, the trivial becomes transcendent and in others, the transcendent turns out to be a mirage. Justin Marks treats both moments with equity, qualifying epiphanies and salvaging disappointments.
Marks confesses to “not seeing what’s here / for amazement that it exists,” but for the reader, what’s here is exhilarating. Each poem feels like a realer version of a reality show, and everything buzzes with a sense of possibility or precariousness, “the ant [he’s] about / to flick from [his] foot” or the fact that he “saw a femur once.” What pervades this book is the feeling that, at any second, we too could see a femur.
Praise for You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored
Justin Marks has a problem. He’s a poet who hates poetry, which is good for us. We don’t want poetry. We want lies. That’s where the art is.
- Wayne Coyne, The Flaming Lips
These poems move like hitchhikers: reckless but driven, youthful but wise, their eyes on the destination and their baggage flying every which way. Hop in, Justin Marks. Let’s get out of here.
- Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket)
With a voice like an antenna, Marks sifts through the strata of reality—the sex and death, work and time, uncertainty and enigma—to present us with a life where the malady is the melody. These are lonely poems, bearded poems, wet dream poems, lunch poems, poems of the roomy heart, and undeniably human poems. You’ll go: Me too.
- Melissa Broder, La Petite Zine editor
About Justin Marks
Justin Marks’ second book is You’re Going to Miss Me When You’re Bored (Barrelhouse Books, 2014). His first book is A Million in Prizes (New Issues, 2009), and his latest chapbooks are We Used to Have Parties (Dikembe Press, 2014) and Best Practices (Greying Ghost, 2013). Recent work has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Matter, similar:peaks, Leveler andInterrupture. He is a co-founder of Birds, LLC, an independent poetry press, and lives in Queens, NY with his wife and their twin son and daughter.
Praise for Justin’s Previous Work
A Million in Prizes (New Issues Press, 2009)
“Salinger, O’Hara, Baudelaire all come to mind, but finally the voice and sensibility here, like the poems themselves, are utterly Justin Marks’ own.”
– Carl Phillips
“His poems are by turns philosophical, nostalgic, and subtly humorous, as he insistently disassembles the barriers between himself and his readers in a generous act of intimacy.”
– Shanna Compton
“Here is a rarely expressed self-awareness that accedes as little to words as it does to the pain of the condition itself.”
– Fanny Howe
On Happier Lawns (Poor Claudia, 2011)
“There’s a kind of poetry I think of as “man poetry,” which is not to say that all men write it or only men write it. “Man poetry” is a string of “I did this,” “I thought this,” “I felt this” statements, very matter-of-fact and declarative. Often done, rarely done well. On Happier Lawns by Justin Marks is in some ways a variation on this genre, but deeply interior and impressionistic, quiet but not abstract: the running inner monologue of an American man full of self-love and self-loathing. The poems are atypical of the genre in that they’re built of phrases rather than sentences, little chunks of language like clouds passing by, some images, some ideas. Like Nick Demske, the book is made of broken sonnets, in the sense that each poem contains 14 lines. In every other respect, they create and adhere to their own form. Marks writes lines that resonate and stick with me for years, occasionally returning to me, surfacing like a thought bubble: “I saw a femur once” … “The heart, a stencil” … “The body, a footnote” … “You’re going to miss me when you’re bored.” These poems make me laugh and at the same time induce pangs of vague nostalgia (“Something making me sad / but I don’t know what”), one of my favorite things that poetry (or any art) can do.”
– Elisa Gabbert
Read Justin Marks’ poems online at: