First Book Interview #34 - Traci Brimhall

Traci Brimhall answers some questions about her fantastic first book, Rookery.

#34 - Traci Brimhall

Enjoy...

Turnaround

Thanks again to Neil and everyone else at Boxcar Poetry Review for the quick turnaround with the aforementioned poem in the last blog post.

My poem is here and the rest of the contents can be seen here.

Though I have it in the Notes section at the end of my manuscript, the penultimate stanza references Woody Allen's Interiors, which is something that I've been trying to get into a poem for way too long.

You should see it if you haven't already.

As an aside: the whole Woody Allen collection needs to be on Blu-ray. It's a monster task, I know, but hopefully someone's working on it.

Somewhere

I was recently interviewed by The Collagist about "Stargazing," which was published in their last issue.

You can read the interview here.

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Thanks to Boxcar Poetry Review for recently taking a poem.

This was nice to hear mostly because it's the last poem I've written in the last few months.

And I've been a reader of theirs for a while now.

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You need to see Somewhere when you can. Sofia Coppola's slowly becoming one of the better young filmmakers out there.

I imagine Stephen Dorff was chosen specifically or the role, as if she almost wrote the movie around him, imagining not the character, but the actual man playing the parts.

And of course with Harris Savides behind the camera, you could watch it with the sound off and be happy, even if the movie wasn't great.

A lot of people won't like it. Many will write it off as a rip-off of Lost in Translation. And though it wouldn't be surprising if she ripped herself off, and it does drink from the same fountain, I think more's at stake here.

Plus it's hard not to love the clear homages to Paris, Texas and The Brown Bunny. And the feeling that the blood of De Sica, Bertolucci, and Antonioni's been coursing through her veins for a long time.

It's definitely one of my favorites of the year, to say the least, and it's something I can't wait to get once it's finally available.

Top 10 Records of 2010

In Order:

1) Owen Pallett - Heartland
2) Hammock - Chasing After Shadows... Living wth the Ghosts / Longest Year EP / North West East South EP
3) Sun Airway - Nocturne of Exploded Crystal Chandelier
4) Ra Ra Riot - The Orchard
5) The National - High Violet
6) Vampire Weekend - Contra
7) Delorean - Subiza
8) Emeralds - Does It Look Like I'm Here?
9) Local Natives - Gorilla Manor
10) Near the Parenthesis - Music for the Forest Concourse

Review

There's another review of Ghost Lights in the new Ragazine -- you can read it here.

Thanks again to Kayleigh.

I know reviews are sometimes the hardest things to coordinate after a book comes out (at least in my experience), so I'm always thankful when someone takes the time to say some words about it.

Paris

The world to which Wenders pays homage is vanishing fast: not the desert, which is close to eternal, but the pay phones and diners and motels that used to line the approach to every small U.S. town, now replaced by cell phones and McDonald’s and multistory Doubletree Hotels and Quality Inns. All offer a sterile, branded comfort—and all deny the lure of the road, the impulse to keep moving, by affirming that, nowadays, however far you go, it’s still going to look just like home.

After

There are some recently published poems online, from the new manuscript, that you're free to take a look at if you'd like.

One poem in The Collagist.

And two poems in the new Pebble Lake Review -- here and here.

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I was pleased to hear that my new manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Brittingham / Pollak Prizes.

But I was more pleased to find out that it's a semi-finalist in another contest that's still going on.

I know that out of thirty manuscripts the odds are pretty low that the judge will select it, but so far, after sending it out for about a year, I've already had a lot more response than I did when I sent out Ghost Lights for the first year.

Also, this is the second contest where I've heard about my manuscript not after the fact.

And as always, it'll go out to a few more contests in a week or so, and the list grows through winter and spring.

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My third semester is done.

Though it feels like I just got here in a way.

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I have a lot of books I'm looking forward to reading, and more first book interviews will be conducted.

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A best-of music list for the year is also on the horizon.

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Travel safely over the next few weeks, everyone.