The News

Well, it happened. There is going to be a book. Octopus Books called me and said, we would like to publish your first book Balloon Pop Outlaw Black next summer, and I said go to hell I hate you, an octopus can't even read, how does it know what books are good, and they said your book is made of bubbles, underwater, and we read it and we liked it, and I said WELL FINE THEN, and then oh my gush are you kidding me, I am going to have a book.

There's a time when you're shut up in a room all day writing long crazed metatextual poems about Popeye when you do not think this will happen. You are mostly happy and crazy and flying on the power of writing a book but when you aren't you are thinking, "This will never happen, I am alone as the ants under the rock (ed. note: you are mixing your animal metaphors, change this to something about barnacles on a shipwreck's hull later) and no one will lift it up to see," but then they do. And it does. But the book did not happen because anyone was looking, it happened because you were shut up crazy in a room all day thinking really hard about what if ... Popeye ... HAD INK FOR BLOOD??? So it goes.

The official announcement is here. Enormous congrats to Ben Mirov also!

NOW FOR THE GOOD PART

Choice Reactions from My Mother

"Looks like the Octopus ... latched on ... to you with all 8 arms!"

"Well, I think you're going to make poetry popular again."

"You're going to bring poetry to the young people."

"Balloon Pop Outlaw Dark is a great name. It really sticks in the mind."

"One way or another, you caught ... the eye ... of the Octopus!" (She then paused, seeming to realize that "the eye of the octopus" was not a thing.)

"You're blowing up like a train going downhill and no one can stop it. Tell everyone to get out of your way, because if they don't, they will be killed."

MEOW

I am not a Trekkie but maybe I am the biggest Trekkie in the world if I am the only one who's ever noticed that this man has an evil cat-face on his forehead:

It evilly grooms its whiskers! 

It holds a tiny evil paw up to its mouth! 

It just ate a small raw morsel of human being -- 

and that small raw morsel was -- 

your Gaze