Michael's first collection of poetry brings together pieces that were originally published as if they were separate poems, revealing for the first time the exact order of reading and narrative structure of the larger work she has been working on. If you have seen her work in The Spoon Knife Anthology, Barking Sycamores, on the Shaping Clay blog, or live in person, then this collection will bring those poems into sharper focus by setting them side by side with one another to create a larger narrative and reflective structure. If you have been following her fiction, then this provides the backstory to the creation of both the Clay Dillon and Lynn Vargas universes. However you come by it, though, hear what the first readers of the volume have been saying:
“The revolution need not be televised because it is here, in Michael Scott Monje, Jr.’s mic-dropping challenge to the entrenched boundaries of rhetoric, research, and writing. Bring your best game to this book. Brush up on your Battlestar Galactica, rap lyrics, music history, art history, literary theory, psychology, coding and cryptology (your
everything, really) and read this rich prosody loudly (use of mouth parts optional). Taste the rhymes. Revel in the references. Dare to recognize that Monje is probably writing to you.” – Felicia Miyakawa, Musicologist, Author of Five Percenter Rap
“Though my divergences don’t share these same-same orbits I can hear the music of these spheres. This love of language rhymes with mine. I say I’m not a poetry guy: not that I don’t know how to love it, not that I don’t carve my own melody into my prose, but because my mind’s main orbits tend toward naturalistic narrative. But I know how
to hear a voice. And here I hear folks I can feel. I know how to hear voices. And I hear folks here whom I know I can know if I just fucking listen. Listen. Who can you hear here?” – Andrew M. Reichart, Author of Wallflower Assassin and Weird Luck
“The US Book is where autistethnography has been begging to go for years. This is a transgenre epic in language and what it means to live neuroqueerly.” – Melanie Yergeau, Ph.D., University of Michigan English Department
