Happy Monday, everybody! Hope you’re coming out of the weekend chipper & ready for a new week. We’re pretty excited around these parts, because our shipment of my poetry book, The Days of Wine & Roses, arrived by FedEx Friday evening. A few kind friends have already bought copies, which I so much appreciate—many thanks to you! & I hope more of you will as well; there's a link to the lulu page over on the left. But because we’re excited, we want to do a little something to spread the excitement around a bit! More on that in a moment….
The specs: 92 pages, paperback “perfect” binding (your standard paperback set-up), with cover design by yours truly using three of my father’s photos—ones that have appeared on this blog. It contains 48 poems (the sonnet sequence “A Few More Fold-Out Postcard Sonnets” is listed as one entity in the contents, but it’s a series of 19 poems). There’s a bit of old Hollywood, & bit of hard-boiled stuff, a fair amount of surreality, some form, some free verse, some prose poems, long poems, short poems—a bit of something for everyone! These are the poems I wrote while living in San Francisco from 1989 to 1998, plus one from the early 00s in Idaho—so the recent poems that have appeared on this blog won’t be there. But don’t fear: a manuscript containing those is quickly assuming book length & I’ll almost certainly publish it next year.
I’m happy with the book—it’s kind of a big deal for me, because after setting my feet on the track to become a poet in the ivied walls of the academy, I managed to take a pretty sharp detour in the mid 80s—I haven’t regretted that detour as such, but I also know that poetry has often walk hand-in-hand with some pretty significant self-destructive tendencies, & getting this published seems to be a way of seeing myself in a new place with poetry—this is part of the reason why I chose to restrict the book to just San Francisco poems, because what I’ve written from 2008 to the present does seem quite different. By the way, for any completists out there: I have assembled a manuscript of Charlottesville, Virginia poems & I’ll publish that at some point too.
So here’s the deal: you could win a copy of The Days of Wine & Roses signed & inscribed by yours truly & shipped to your place of residence, because we're giving one away. Instructions follow:
1. Simply leave a comment specifying you'd like to enter the giveaway contest on—please note carefully—Eberle’s Platypuss-in-Boots blog post for either today, Monday February 15th (with special guest star Lamb Chop!) or on the upcoming Theme Thursday post for Thursday the 18th—this week's theme is "Bell," so we'll all look forward to what the Platypuss gang does with that!
2. You folks know I love your comments on Robert Frost's Banjo, but comments on the Banjo won't count toward the contest. Comments for the contest have to be on Platypuss-in-Boots. Only comments mentioning the book giveaway will be entered.
3. Only one comment per post counts toward the contest. So if you leave two comments on Monday but none on Thursday (for instance), you're only entered once. But if you leave a comments on both Monday & Thursday, you're entered twice! You've doubled your chances of winning! See how that works? Two entries maximum per person—but you'd already figured that out.
4. We’ll keep the contest open until midnight Mountain Standard Time on Thursday February 18th, & then in the pre-dawn gloaming on Friday February 19th Eberle will draw a name from one of my very own hats, which will contain all the entrants' names on slips of paper cut as uniformly as possible with my very own orange-handled scissors. Not as high-tech as random number generators, but there you have it! I'll announce the winner on Robert Frost's Banjo by about midday on Friday.
Good luck one & all, & hope to see you at Platypuss-in-Boots over the next few days!