Juliet Cook’s newest collection, Malformed Confetti, is being published by Crisis Chronicles Press—in honor of that, we’ve asked her three questions about the collection and her work. In addition to her own writing, Cook is the editor/publisher of Blood Pudding Press (print) and Thirteen Myna Birds (online) and creates other art too, such as semi-abstract painting/collage art creatures. You can find out more at JulietCook.weebly.com.
-Interview by Olivia Olson
1.You mention the word “grotesque” a few times when describing your work. What is it about the grotesque that makes you want to write about it?
I’m not purposely aiming for grotesque for the sake of grotesque, but I seem to be attuned to a visceral interpretation of what’s inside the mind and how bodies are perceived and devoured, often disrespectfully like pieces of meat. Some people separate the mind from the body; I prefer to combine the two, even if the fusion mix generates some discomfort. I think some people are too easily bothered and disturbed by some of the more visceral parts of life and I find it more interesting to explore what disturbs us and why, as opposed to just backing away or ignoring or acting as if certain disturbances do not exist when they do.
2.You’ve recently released a couple of collections of collaborative work. How did that work? Did you have anything you disagreed about?
I don’t think I’d spend much of my time collaborating with a writer that I had much disagreement with. My recent collaborations have flowed fairly smoothly, especially my work with my longest lasting collaborator, j/j hastain. The two of us have now been collaborating for several years, had our first collaborative poetry chapbook, Dive Back Down, accepted by Dancing Girl Press last year and coming soon and very recently assembled our first full-length manuscript, tentatively titled A Red Witch, Every Which Way and sent it to a new press to consider.
We haven’t had any significant disagreements and are usually really open to each other’s ideas/suggestions. For me personally, the trickiest part of the collaborative process involves revision. When it comes to my individual poems, when I suddenly feel compelled to revise a few lines, rearrange a few lines, or cut a few lines out of a poem, I just go ahead and do it and don’t feel the need to explain WHY since it’s often an emotional reaction sort of reason. But with a collaborative poem, I can’t just suddenly delete and change and rearrange lines, unbeknown to my collaborator, so I have to email the collaborator about it and try to explain why, rather than just going with my gut flow.
3.How would you describe your new collection, Malformed Confetti? How are the poems threaded together?
My Malformed Confetti is my second full-length poetry book and includes poems that range from 2008 to 2015. I first started working on assembling the manuscript in late 2010, so it’s not something I’ve only been focused on for a year or two. During my most recent revision of the manuscript, I dealt with a challenging emotional streak derived from the memories the collection elicited for me. I feel strongly about the poems and I know I’ve spent a lot of emotional energy and time with the collection’s content. I’ve had quite a few chapbooks published within those seven years, but chapbooks are a lot shorter and more small scale and more quickly formatted than a full-length I’ve been working on for over five years.
My first full-length, Horrific Confection, was published in late 2008 and after that, I was tentatively planning on focusing on chapbooks for a while before thinking about compiling another full-length. Shortly after 2010 began, I ended up having an unexpected carotid artery dissection, which resulted in an aneurism, which resulted in a stroke, which resulted in some brain damage and aphasia, and then exactly one year after my stroke, I ended up getting divorced from my marriage.
It was in the midst of my divorce, while I was temporarily living with my parents and undergoing depression, that I first started to assemble Malformed Confetti. It’s undergone a lot of revisions (older poems removed, newer poems added, and order rearrangement) throughout that time. I started submitting it to various presses, on & off, in early 2011 – and it was a semi-finalist in a contest in 2012 and then a finalist in another contest in 2013 – but towards the end of 2014, when it still had not found its home yet, I was considering giving up on it, not because I didn’t think it was good, but because it was starting to feel old, especially in terms of the memories it evoked. I try to be a fairly present-focused individual and I was starting to feel as if the manuscripts content was getting too close for my own comfort to past-focused, including a part of my past that was certainly meaningful but was overly emotionally challenging for me to reconnect with again and again, as I continued to read/re-read/work on revising the manuscript. The time frame during which these poems were written (my mid-thirties through early forties) was a part of my life that involved a lot of mental/emotional glitches and conflict and tumult and uncertainty and changes.
Also, I didn’t want the content of the manuscript to feel unconnected, since it was including seven years worth of poems, some written before and some written after my brain underwent a malformation. The content of the manuscript felt oddly in between, but I wanted the in-betweens to be interconnected. Then again, I’ve always been an in between contradictory mess in one way or another, so I was eventually able to format the twisted up innards of this collection into successful interconnectivity.
I arranged the content into five different sections that coalesce well together, allowing the different subject matters to be uniquely separated yet thematically linked.
The Malformed Confetti begins with a twisted teaser piece called “Deadly Doll Head Dissection” then divvies itself into these five different sectionals –
- Beginnings – Hideously Edible Girlie Dolls
- Rank Middles – (Pseudo)Surgically Enhanced Female Creatures
- Gradually Ebbing Down – (Para)Normal Uncertain Wives
- Suddenly Ebbing Further Down – (Ab)Normal Waves on the Brink
- Off & On Flow – Almost Drowning, But Then Resurging
Two of my poems that were published by Hermeneutic Chaos this past summer appear inside my Malformed Confetti. “dream about being” is at the beginning of section 4 and “Un-sided Self Portrait” is the very final poem in the collection.
The publication date for Malformed Confetti has not yet been officially announced, but it was accepted for publication near the beginning of 2015 and will likely be published near the beginning of 2016. I’m highly delighted that it is going to be published by Crisis Chronicles Press, a unique independent press based in Cleveland Ohio, which is less than an hour away from where I’ve been living the last five years. Crisis Chronicles Press editor John Burroughs is a very vibrant and active member of the Cleveland poetry scene as both a poet and a publisher and I’m truly excited that my book has found its home with his press.
I’m also utterly delighted that poet, editor/publisher of Arsenic Lobster and Misty Publications and fabulous friend Susan Yount has created a unique and creepy little video trailer for my forthcoming book, which can be viewed/listened to here.
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Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications, recently including Arsenic Lobster, Diode, FLAPPERHOUSE, Hermeneutic Chaos, ILK, and Menacing Hedge. She is the author of more than thirteen poetry chapbooks, most recently including POISONOUS BEAUTYSKULL LOLLIPOP (Grey Book Press, 2013), RED DEMOLITION (Shirt Pocket Press, 2014), a collaboration with Robert Cole called MUTANT NEURON CODEX SWARM (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2015), and another new collaboration with j/j hastain called Dive Back Down (forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press). Juliet’s first full-length poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX in 2008 and her second full-length poetry book Malformed Confetti is forthcoming from Crisis Chronicles Press.
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