Big Ups
One of the things we wanted, needed, to have before finishing up the layout of the book was a blurb. A few blurbs would be even better, of course. We wanted to have a few quotes to print on the back cover and after thinking about the people we wanted to give galleys to, we decided on three.
Kim was both nervous and excited to ask Chris Nealon, a wonderful and unique poet who was her professor at UC Berkeley. She dreaded the idea that he might find her book to be, well, not so impressive.
I reached out to an old friend, Mike Sonksen. Mike is an old friend and known all over Los Angeles as Mike the Poet. He literally is everywhere, hosting and running readings in theaters, bookstores, cafes, bars. That’s of course when he’s not teaching poetry at a charter school or driving his bus around town for his one-of-a-kind tour of Los Angeles. He is also a great performer and fine writer, whose own book, I Am Alive in Los Angeles, Judy and I reviewed for our short-lived column on Suicide Girls. He is the hardest-working man in the business.
The third person that received the galley was Jack Grapes, a poet and an editor (of ONTHEBUS) and perhaps most importantly, a teacher. I am pretty sure everybody who has been part of the Los Angeles literary world knows, or at least has heard of, Jack. He has taught hundreds and hundreds of writers everything we know about writing. Kim and I met years ago in one of his writing workshops. She, as I had years before, found herself in his class as a teen. Judeth also took his workshop when she moved out here and she and I published many of the writers in the class through our literary magazine, Wednesday. I felt the same nervousness waiting to hear back from Jack as Kim felt waiting for Chris Nealon’s blurb.
When Jack emailed a blurb over to us, I was completely overwhelmed with — I don’t know what I was feeling. Relief. Pride. Ecstasy. A bit of sadness at finally feeling like we were little babies no longer and we were all learning to stand on our own, to claim our places in the literary world.
The others soon wrote. Both Chris Nealon and Mike the Poet gave it sparkling reviews. The fact that three such different types of poets and teachers found “Who’s to Say What’s Home” to be so compelling, challenging, and moving, gave all of us a great deal of comfort and confidence.
Each time I pick up the book, which is often, I turn to the back cover and read the blurbs again.
The poems in this collection will knock your socks off, and if you’re not wearing socks, they’ll bring you to your kness. Every generation produces a poet of unique sensibilities, and Kim Calder is that poet, a bright new light announcing her presence with this book of poems. There are only a few poets who can bring such use of language and the heartfelt sense of loss to bear on the work at hand. As a first book which portends many more to come, it ranks with Sharon Olds’ Satan Says, Dorianne Laux’s Awake, and Richard Jones’ Country of Air. You will be reading Kim Calder’s poems for many years to come, and they will change your life. — Jack Grapes
I think that this is close to what I felt when I first Kim read about ten years ago. I think that maybe, we have done a very important thing by publishing this book.