Poetry Staff Pick with Vlad

It was hard to pick which of Stacey's poems I liked best, but I finally fixed on this one as just one of my favorites.


Fixing My Voice
When Dr. Rosen says he can “fix my voice,” he means
he will give me shots of estrogen that will surge through
my body like electric shocks, sending the hair on my chin
and stomach running for cover. He doesn’t want me to be warm.
He doesn’t want to listen to my large truck voice
fill his office like his soy milk
bursting up from his coffee’s deep bottom.
He wants to imagine me as an affirmation.
He wants me perched upon his plastic table
with my smooth naked legs, singing hymns
in the voice of a woman who needs him
in order to recover some piece of herself
that has been swallowed by the jaws of testosterone,
opening and closing hard like the doors of angry lovers.
He doesn’t exactly know that he hates me,
the feeling is more like gender indigestion,
how the sound of my voice keeps rising
up in his throat and he can’t rid himself
of the image of my lover who stretches out
nude in the dark bed, presses her hand
above my chest saying,
“talk to me, please, talk.”


-Stacey Waite

If you want to hear more of Stacey's unique and powerful writing, please join us at Beaverdale Books on Oct. 6 at 7pm for our next reading!

Poetry Pick with Kelsey, Part 2

Okay, so I couldn't pick just one...

A Poem in Response to Those Who Argue that my Desire
            to Purposefully Remove my Breasts is an Anti-Feminist Notion

Keep in mind I weigh a buck eighty five 

and this is not about a desire for less flesh 

Keep in mind that celebrating womanhood is a trap 

and that the men’s shirts I like to wear 

are not conducive to a breast environment

Admit that it is your body that you want me to celebrate 

that in fact you want my assurance that your own breasts 

are a part of your picture ID card at the woman club.

What a paradise it is to not think in halves but tops and bottoms 

I’m all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

see how that works, all man on the top and woman on the bottom

You may want to inquire about my mind, after all, 

we wouldn’t want my mind to me male and it happens to be on top 

Mind on top, woman on the bottom 

See how that works? 

Mind on top and woman on the bottom.

My mind is not a man. In fact, my mind 

hates my man because my man is trying to be on top 

and mind is on top, mind has to be on top

You still want to me to tell you what I would call myself then 

being all man on the top and woman on the bottom 

You still want me to name it, to name 

what my vagina and breast-less chest

would mean or be called, and I say, You do it. After all, 

it is you who have been naming me all along.

                                -Stacey Waite

Come hear Stacey Waite and Susanna Childress read their poetry October 6 at 7pm in Beaverdale Books! The reading is FREE and open to the public. "Like" us on Facebook at Younger American Poets Reading Series for more information about upcoming readings!

October 6 Reading: Poetry Pick with Kelsey

Poem for my First Girlfriend

Jessie fell through me 
like wind slipping through a screen,

the way hands push through water. 

For sixteen years before we met, 

I never knew the feel of my own body, 

how I might look at myself 

if I had entertained the possibility 

of not lying beneath 

but lying with, one sound— 

no ocean for the shell to hold.

                -Stacey Waite 

Thank you Rick and Sandy Soria!

Rather than having our poets stay overnight in a hotel, we thought it might be fun to send them away for a night. Now, we're able to do so. Thanks to Rick and Sandy Soria, our poets will be staying in one of the century-old farms of Iowa for the night. We think they'll really enjoy this!

Thanks again, Sorias. Without your donation this Fall, we might have had some unhappy poets sleeping on couches.

Thank you Ace Body & Motor!

Thanks to Ace Body & Motor, a locally owned auto repair shop in Des Moines, our first reading on September 1 was a success!

Find yourself needing body or motor work? Check out Ace Body & Motor on NE 45th Street. While using their free Wi-Fi and drinking complimentary coffee, you can wait for Larry, Keith, and Jason (and the rest of the guys) to take a look at your car. See more at their website: www.acebodyandmotor.com or "like" them on Facebook at Ace Body & Motor for more information, special deals, and the occasional car tip from Larry!

Thanks again AB&M!

Get to Know the Poets: Stacey Waite, Oct. 6

Stacey Waite is originally from Long Island, New York. S/he majored in English at Bucknell University and earned an M.F.A. and a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. S/he now teaches as an Assistant Professor at University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Waite has published three collections of poems: the lake has no saint (Tupelo Press, 2010), winner of the Snowbound Prize in Poetry; Love Poem to Androgyny (Main Street Rag, 2007); and Choke (Thorngate Road, 2004), winner of the Frank O’Hara Prize. A new book, Butch Geography, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2012.

YAPRS asked Stacey a few questions in anticipation of her October 6th reading with Susanna Childress:

YAPRS: Do you have a favorite book that people who know you or your work might not expect you to like?
SW: The saddest part of trying to answer this question is how predicable my reading tastes are. I can't think of a single book that would be all that surprising. But perhaps it would be surprising to know that I am embarrassingly compelled by the show Project Runway, and that any time I see Fun Dip, I feel the need to have some.

YAPRS: Is there an author whom most poetry-lovers probably haven't read, but whom you think they should read?
SW: Well, it's hard to say what poets people might or might not know about (my goodness I am being very evasive of these questions) but I think lots of poets should read Antonio Porchia, and a book by Carol Potter called A Short History of Pets.

YAPRS:To what do you aspire in your writing?
SW: I know a lot of poets who say they write for themselves or even for the poems themselves, but the truth is for me that writing has always been about connection, about trying to connect with the world outside the poem, about trying to bring queer lives, queer epistemologies and queer bodies into view, about trying to make the world more bearable for those of us who fall outside the sanctioned categories for being. It's not that I believe in some romantic notion that poetry can change the world, it's more that worlds can change inside poems, and sometimes that's all the possibility we need, at least for the moment.

YAPRS: What drives you and/or your poetry?
SW: I think the answer to this question changes quite often. But I think, for this moment, my poems are driven by my own desire to say something meaningful, something terrible, something beautiful, something queer, something completely unlike the last thing I said. And when I fail to say something meaningful, I just try to enjoy the music of having failed.

YAPRS: If you weren’t a poet, what would you be?
SW: I always wanted to be a musician (yes, this is another cliche of poet as failed rockstar), but in all honesty, I bet if I weren't a poet, I'd probably want to be a carpenter, but then I'd realize how much math is involved. So maybe a postman (I am drawn to uniforms and task completion). Or, maybe a wildlife chainsaw artist. Those guys turn dying trees into birds, into hands, into mailboxes. Again, with the mail. Postman. Postman it is.