Beautiful Distractions
-I am working on something that might come to fruition but I hate sharing what I’m doing because of superstition & also I am afraid of being earnest online but I am excited about it!!
-I planted three little flowers that came in a Cheerios box & I saw those little bitches sprouting, absolutely reaching towards the sky! Then I stopped my cat from taking a shit in them.
-I helped my boyfriend construct a human-sized cocoon for a music video he’s making. So important to support men being creative …..
-He received his stimulus check but I have not which is sexism.
-Samuel & I ate vegan food in his car with the windows up & we both had really bad gas later & by that I mean later in the book store visiting Arti I walked away from mid-conversation to fart in the children’s section.
-I washed my roommate’s sheets because my disgusting cat has been sleeping on them while she’s out of town. I lugged the sheets in a cart to the laundry empire down the street. Gary our neighbor stopped me & asked me where Hannah was. I was like, “I’m actually washing her sheets!” He was like “…Okay.”
-For an entire week I made the worst food humanely imaginable. A lot of it was due to using coconut cream instead of coconut milk.
-I debased myself to a dozen different people I admire asking them if they would please, please blurb my book & if you can’t I totally understand because I suck but it would mean the world to me if you did do you want me to bake you fresh bread???
-I made the mistake of reading the 4 reviews there are for Dreaming of You on Good Reads. One review said, “This was certainly an interesting take on things but I am not a fan of Melissa Lozada-Oliva’s poetry in general,” another said “As a straight European Man a lot of things went over my head.” Okay.
-I am fully vaccinated! Yesterday I spent the entire day lying pin-straight in my bed like a woman tied to train tracks while my hot head pumped wildly. I could only get up to pee. I walked up the stairs & felt shaky. Honestly, I had a blast. I feel 100 percent better now & am happy to be protected.
DISTRACTIONS AS KYLE CARRERO LOPEZ
Kyle is the only person so far who has never pretended to read a book to impress somebody, which … hot!!! I love Kyle’s work & internet/real presence & was so excited to get his answers to my READING SUCKS questions. Kyle Carrero Lopez was born to Cuban parents in northern New Jersey. He is the author of the chapbook MUSCLE MEMORY, winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He is also a founding member of LEGACY, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists. His poems are published in The Nation, POETRY, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
what was your experience with books/reading like when you were a kid?
I was always really into reading, especially fantasy and mystery! My mom says I would read everything I could get my hands on wherever we'd go. I loved trying to read the biggest books possible because I thought that was more impressive. These days, most of my favorite books are poetry collections under 90 pages.
Two books I vividly remember reading back then are Tarot Says Beware by Betsy Byars, which has a youth sleuth protagonist named Herculeah Jones—camp!—and then there's this other book called Losing Joe's Place by Gordon Korman. It’s about a group of teenage boys spending the summer in an apartment that one of their brothers rents. The apartment is above a deli, and they eventually end up having to run it after accidentally injuring the landlord (the antagonist, obviously). They end up adding this cake to the menu that's literally just made from a store-bought mix, and the whole town becomes obsessed, business booms, some other coming-of-age stuff that happens, and unfortunately, the landlord doesn't die. The boys make so much money for the deli that he sells all of the apartments and builds a condo over it. Really solid text for millennial parents trying to teach their kids about landlords.
have you ever pretended to read a book to impress somebody else?
I can't think of a time I did this! I definitely pretended to read entire books that college professors assigned and then attempted to impress them in class, to varying levels of success.
when does reading suck & when does reading rule?
Reading sucks when the writing sucks. Seriously, though, reading is often really hard! It's a big mental ask. I've been in a few different book clubs and have found it challenging to keep up each time. Reading rules when you come across good shit. I was recently reading Taylor Johnson's Inheritance, wherein the poem "Club 2718" has the line, "Like any american what haunts me is my addiction to private property, not time or blackness." Hello!?
when's a time when you felt like, "okay uh i'm an intellectual..."?
A friend messaged me to say she heard Mariame Kaba cite one of my poems during a lecture she was giving at Cooper Union. That still doesn't feel real.
is there a moment in a book that is so visceral that you feel as if you were there?
We couldn’t ever reiterate Plath's various bigotries enough, but: the skiing scene in The Bell Jar has stuck with me since high school. The rush of air and trees, the ice water down her throat, her boyfriend's smug face looking down at her after she's broken her leg. She did what she had to do when she wrote that scene. Devastating! I'll probably never go skiing because of it.
tell me the books that define the angst of your youth, the chaos of your present, and the hot ghost of your future:
The angst of my youth: Jenny Nimmo's Midnight for Charlie Bone
The chaos of my present: Anne Boyer's Garments Against Women
The hot ghost of my future: Cedric Robinson's Black Marxism
THE BOOK THAT I READ
Stranger Faces by Namwali Serpell
I haven’t read an INTELLECTUAL BOOK in awhile & it was nice having my brain blasted again. It reminded me that one of my college professors once said that I had strong potential in the field of academia and that I have nightmares thinking about where my life would be if I decided to be an academic. I am imagining a lot of knit sweaters and being kind of a punisher at parties. Okay, I think I am just speaking from experience of that one time that I found out that the Iowa Writer’s Workshop was sponsored by the CIA & that’s how I would start conversations in the summer of 2019. I also wear a lot of knit sweaters. I am my own nightmare.
Anyway this book, by Namwali Serpell, a professor at Harvard, made me miss the holes you get into under different lenses. Like what under what lens would one write an essay about Chet Hanks? And the answer is, no lens actually. Writing about him endorses the spectacle of him. Maybe?? I don’t care about him!! It was nice to laugh at him for a day & a half until I learned he was an abuser. If someone wants to write a beautiful essay about how Chet Hanks happened I will 100 % read most of it.
THIS BOOK is this like, lecture (?) about Faces, in the social-psychological sense. I would love love to sit in a class taught by Surrell. She’s so excited about everything that she is talking about that I become excited about it! Really nerdy but also poetic shit. The first essay is about the Elephant Man and how he turned his ugliness into a spectacle, and thus, an art form, and thussSSS, beauty. She compares this to Michael Jackson’s trajectory, how his addiction to plastic surgery maybe wasn’t self-loathing, but in fact … artistic practice??? I am not sold on that but isn’t that interesting? Another essay was about Psycho, where she talks about how the audience desperately seeks familiarity in any face after our heroine Marion is killed. She beautifully describes Marion’s face crumpled on the floor like a “pair of panties.” We try to find familiarity in her handsome killer, then in her sister. Then she goes on this whole tangent about the mop in psycho & how it resemble’s a woman’s corpse which uh I have been saying since forever & even wrote into a story recently. Another was about The Grizzly Man documentary by Warner Herzog, focusing on the way a man who was mauled to death by a 1000 pound grizzly bear would anthropomorphize bears and was shocked when the bear betrayed him with his bear-body. This is a tragedy but even in writing that line, it’s kind of hilarious??? Because bears can’t betray! The final essay is on emogis, where she says that the emogi is the “celebration of customized choice in neoliberal capitalism” which okay, go off!!! But she also then says that it’s evolution is also an example of how humans have always been playing with language, especially when it’s used against them.
Here is a poem
uninspired
people really call anything
“rupi kaur” poetry if they
can just understand it
which must make her the most understood
woman on the planet. i am letting go
of trying to be smart
or trying to make you believe
i know what i’m doing. i don’t.
i just want you to get me.
a generation is defined
by an event we all mourned
together, like when that girl asked her boyfriend
to shave her head in their bathroom so that
she could feel more bisexual