Full-Length Dissection/Toxic Cheesecake

For days upon days and hours upon hours recently, I worked hard at assembling my second full-length poetry collection, so that I could submit it to a source I adore, which was accepting submissions up through July 15. I sent my submission their way the night of July 14, so pretty much just in time. Yay!

I imagine very many writers will submit there, so who knows how their readings will turn out, but I am very happy I am trying. Also, whether or not my collection is accepted by them, it now exists! I can add poems, remove poems, update other details and more, bit by darkly delicious bit now without having to spend quite as many hours upon hours.

On a not so happy note, having spent hours upon hours reading many of my newly included poems, many of them written in 2008 and 2009, I could not help thinking about how after many years of working on my poetry writing, just a few years back, I finally started truly liking, enjoying, and being impressed with and proud of much of my work. However, having suffered from an unexpected stroke early in 2010, losing part of my brain power, and still in the midst of aphasia and nowhere near fully recovered, I now cannot write (or otherwise uniquely express myself or read or remember/memorize or review etc...) anywhere near as tremendously as I used to and sometimes I really feel as if that is awfully unfortunate. Other times, I try to focus on the fact that I'm lucky to be alive and I need to continue to do my best to recover (even though I'm not sure how to do my best to recover). Frankly, the last six months of my life have been strangely unsettling in a variety of ways.

Back to poetry though, it is still important and wonderful to me. I'm glad that I still love it (and I'm glad that my personality has not substantially changed) and I'd like to think that working on trying to read it, write it, and think about poeticism has helped to improve my recovery and will continue to do so, pretty please with dark sugar on top and a reem of decadent poison darts.

My very first full-length poetry book, 'HORRIFIC CONFECTION', was published in 2008 by BlazeVOX and my print copies very recently sold out, but it can still be partaken online for free, right here: http://www.blazevox.org/ebk-jCook%20REAL.pdf.

It was easy for me to come up with that book's title 'HORRIFIC CONFECTION', because I had been working on some of those poems for many years and then had been submitting that collection to various sources for many more years. This time though, with my second full-length book, coming up with the best title did not come easily to me and I'm still not sure!

I tentatively entitled it 'ERRANT CONFETTI', but I'm not quite sure about that. Here are a few other titles I thought about/am thinking about which might be even more strangely interesting. Feel free to let me know what you think.

-CONFETTI DISSECTION

-BLOODY CONFETTI

-MACHINATED HALO

-Deadly Doll Head Dissection

-Anal Cheesecake Festival

-Toxic Taste Test My Vile Love

Of course, I suppose you might be able to think about that better if you knew what kind of oddly hideous poems where toxinated within, but you don't.

Alas.