There’s a nice little review of Crying Shame over at Vouched. Roxane Gay likes the “witty and evasively disturbing” parts. If that doesn’t sound just exactly like what your loved ones want this holiday season, then I just don’t understand your family. Thanks, Roxane!
Many thanks to the more than 120 Cal Poly students who came out to hear me read and watch me awkwardly drink a very large Perrier Monday night. I was told they knew how to rock in Shelbyville. But nobody rocks like… San Luis Obispo!
Some News Re: Crying Shame
I’m reading at Cal Poly on November 7. You should go. Additionally, Valparaiso Poetry Review is looking for reviewers of Crying Shame and other wonderful volumes. Ahem.
How You Got Your Name
At night, we watched old movies listening for names to name our child. Later at night, we discussed color; how it ruined movies with promises, and we wondered why it didn’t ruin children. Maybe it did.
Anyway, that is the story of how you got your name. It has everything a story needs, including conflict. We didn’t have any money; meaning, we didn’t have enough.
The movies kept arriving, and the same people kept appearing in them with new names and problems that were new and new almost kissing. The kissing in movies has never been right.
Today, of course, a movie can begin with ridiculous kissing under a sky that is several kinds of blue. But that is not where your name comes from.
(originally published in Cutbank)
Weird Ice Cream
Nobody buys weird ice cream—the peppercorn/maple, bacon/vanilla, what have you. We give away free samples, and people consistently rank the weird ones as “among the best things I’ve ever put in my mouth,” but nobody purchases. People want to buy chocolate. People purchased the quadruple chocolate until we came out with our quintuple chocolate, which has been our best seller for five months in a row. It’s a monster. It’s so popular we can’t give the quad away to diabetic children. We only keep the quad around to make people buying the quintuple feel even more superior than they already do. When they see the quad on the menu they’re like: I’m not eating that sugarless brown shit. That being said, people still rank the weird flavors higher than the quintuple, but, and just to emphasize my point again, people don’t buy weird ice cream. Once you realize that buying ice cream is an exercise in asserting one’s essential normality, you are ready to make a fortune in this business.
Crying Shame at SPD and on Kindle
Well, Crying Shame is now available at SPD, and as if that wasn’t great enough, you can now have a robot read it to you via Kindle for only $1. If you do get the robot version, I love to know where and under what circumstances the robot was reading to you. Note: I been told that having the robot read to you is not the #1 reason people choose to read books in this format, but I find that very hard to believe.
Here’s my book Crying Shame. You can purchase it now from Amazon, or directly from the publisher Blazevox Books. Soon you’ll be able to get it from Small Press Distribution.
Want some free samples? Here’s one, two, three, four. Want to read an interview of moi? If you’d like to get in touch, I can be reached at jeffreymorgan.cryingshame@gmail.com.
Want to read that humbling blurb by the incomparable C.S. Giscombe? Read on.
From the ugly stick to the dirty martini Jeffrey Morgan uncovers much to cry shame about in this book of crumbling points and ambiguous figures. Cry shame? I mean to suggest that there’s much exquisite articulation here, meaning jointedness, meaning mano-a-mano encounters of the most uncertain kind, meaning a way—all through the book—of breaking-it-down that’s always verging on both collapse and a way of teasing out desire. Here, reading strategies rub torsos with rescue strategies; “an insatiable loneliness” butts up against being bored. But Morgan’s gaze is always up-tunnel, if you know what I mean; the power’s in Morgan’s ability to look and look and look. No one—neither rescuer nor castaway, not commuter, not gentle or base reader—walks away whole from Crying Shame.
—C. S. Giscombe
"I climb out of the refrigerator before dawn and wipe the condensation from my spine."
