Success

Hi, J’Lyn Chapman here. I’ll be with you for the next couple of weeks. On the agenda:

Christina Mengert
Gérard Gavarry
Omar Pérez
Margaret Randall
And another book giveaway: Kristen Kaschock’s Sleight.

But first off: our release party for issue 38.1 was a success. The Dark Horse is indeed an amazing space, and the men’s bathroom, which I guess I was using, looks just like a women’s bathroom; we invented a very pink and tasty drink called the Gin-s-berg* (alternatively, the Gin-sberg); we wrote an exquisite-corpse poem that got a lot of laughs when Eric Fischman read it and, if I didn’t throw it away, will be posted here; we had 11 readers, some rocks, rose petals, and sparkles; and we sold a bunch of the new issue. Which is no big surprise. The issue is fantastic and so are the people who bought it.

Which leads me to add that you can currently buy it from us by emailing bgin@naropa.edu. It will also soon be for sale at SPD.

Are you going to the AWP this year in Chicago? We’ll have a small table there, so please stop by and get a copy of the newest issue as well as some back issues.

If you attended the release party last night: Thank you. We appreciate your support.

* gin, seven-up, grenadine. We want it to be famous, so please ask your local bartender for it by name.

Ana Bozicevic: “I love big cars. I fucking love to stuff them up my cunt.”

The fall issue of Bombay Gin will feature the marvelous work of one charmingly blunt Ana Bozicevic, Croatian-born poet and editor of the online journal esque <http://www.esquemag.com/&gt;. I got to know Ana when she was an invited workshop facilitator, along with her partner Amy King, at Naropa’s 2011 Summer Writing Program. The theme that week was cyborgian natures and the hybrid. In Ana’s class, we pieced together cyborg manifestos, crafted exquisite corpses, and culminated in the production of a group video depicting the simultaneous reading of twelve individual poems. What could the viewer piece together from that? Why, that ‘the human symphony is a cacophonous massage,’ no doubt–another of the provocative and lyrical statements that Ana spouts conversationally, as if to speak in poetry was the norm, and not the divine birthright of a few highly talented artist-writers.

To Bombay Gin, Ana has graciously gifted three new poems and a lecture delivered at Naropa University. A teaser from that material:

I filled the oilcloth bags with some
Gooey liquids – jam, baby oil, and Vaseline, and
I lined them up & called them
Perverts. People could squeeze them. It was a great exhibit

Check back soon for more previews of the fabulousness to come!

–Jess