the playlist: Danse Danse Macabre!

Track 1: If Birds Gather You Hair For Nesting by Anna Journey

The title of Anna Journey’s debut poetry collection comes from an Appalachian folk myth: if birds gather your hair for nesting, you’ll go crazy. The beauty and threat of that statement runs throughout Journey’s work. In “Adorable Siren, Do You Love the Damned?” which opens the book, a speaker walks through a rather interesting neighborhood garden: “On the crack / corner those transvestite hookers won’t quit / competing with my garden’s // barbed and carnal tongues […] sharp as fuchsia // spokes of my oleander. I could put / my eye out looking. I could run with knives.” In the Southern bayou in which many of these poems are set, everything that is beautiful is also dangerous. The closed buds of magnolias are really your grandparents’ ghosts “keeping their clammy petals pulled / shut, like Klan hoods.”

Track 2: Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Published in 1993, this short story collection has been overshadowed by Marquez’s masterpieces Love in the Time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Nonetheless, these twelve stories are worth your attention because once you read them, you belong to them. All of the tales involve Latin Americans adrift in Europe and all of them threaten to give the Twilight Zone a run for it’s money. A personal favorite of mine involves a woman whose car breaks down in the desert. After flagging down a bus and getting on in hopes of finding a gas station or a payphone, she realizes the bus is headed for an insane asylum. When she constantly insists that she “only came to use the phone,” the nurses and doctors think she’s as crazy as everyone else. And that’s only the beginning. Don’t even get me started on the story about the old woman who waits for death and has trained her dog to weep at her grave when the time comes.

Track 3: Phantom Noise by Brian Turner

The opening poem in Turner’s follow-up to the critical acclaimed Here, Bullet takes place in a Lowe’s Home Improvement Center. A rather harmless setting until, of course, the aisles are besieged by the ghosts of the Iraq War: “…no one seems to notice / the casualty collection center Doc High marks out / in ceiling fans, aisle 15. Wounded Iraqis with IVs / sit propped against boxes as 92 sample Paradiso fans / hover in a slow revolution of blades.” While Turner’s first book emphasized poems in the midst of the war itself, this collection examines the trauma of veterans and the ghosts he brings home with him.

Track 4: Let the Dead Bury Their Dead by Randall Kenan

You have not lived (or died) until you’ve read this short story collection.
Set in Tims Creek, a rural North Carolina community, these stories have one foot on the ground and one foot in the grave. Published in 1992, Randall Kenan was well ahead of his times when he wrote about a boy who talks to dead people on behalf of his living neighbors. (Kenan’s story has a twist that puts The Sixth Sense to shame.) And if the ghosts aren’t enough, many of these stories are as haunting as they are homoerotic. Consider Dean Williams, a young white boy used to seduce (and blackmail) to wealthiest black man in town. The plots are delicious and the writing is excellent which might explain why the book was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Track 5: Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous

A brilliant novelist and playwright, Cixous is dead serious in this collection of essays about the writing process. The book is divided into three sections: The School of the Dead argues that something or someone must die in order for good writing to be born; The School of Dreams examines the role dreams play in the creative process; and The School of Roots takes us into the “nether realms” of writing. Haunting and incredibly useful, these essays demand that we recognize that “the only book worth writing is the one we are afraid to write.”

SAEED JONES received his MFA in Creative Writing at Rutgers University – Newark. He’s a graduate of Western Kentucky University where he won the Jim Wayne Miller Award for Poetry. While at Western, he was the poetry editor for Rise Over Run Magazine. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications like StorySouth, Barnwood Magazine, Splinter Generation, The Adirondack Review, Mary and Ganymede. He blogs regularly at saeedjones.wordpress.com.