What I mean is: I want to thank you!
In about a month, my [first] chapbook will be out, The Sum of Two Mothers. You've read my thanks in my posting, read about the cover art, and, now, Ariana of ELJ Publications has said the release date is moved up to December 1--if not sooner!
I'm waiting for my amazing artist-friend to finish her work, then hand it over to Leah to design the cover.
Yesterday, I signed the contract.
So, I am excited, for sure.
Note: the offer above has expired.
I just want to thank you again!
Dennis
Here are some blurbs for the chapbook:
Sometimes the most complicated stories of our
lives can be put into the shortest of forms. In this small book of poems Dennis
Etzel Jr. recounts a fragmented chronology from his childhood to his
fatherhood. Living their lives with love and integrity, Etzel's two mothers
raised him together despite the status quo resistance they daily faced in
Topeka, KS. Now the father of sons, Etzel's poems draw as much from his own
memories as they do from the larger social context of marriage equality — and
in bridging that gap between the personal and the political with lyrical grace
and political conviction, Sum of Two Mothers is a riveting little book that is
as much about growing up with two mothers, as it is about becoming a father who
is raising his sons with a more inclusive — but equally protected — model of
the world.
—Kristin Prevallet, I Afterlife, Essay in Mourning Time
I love this book, and I wanted to say that
first, “in danger / of being / engendered”.
These are the beautiful and percipient poems Minnie Bruce Pratt’s son
could have written if the cops hadn’t ripped him from the arms of his two
mothers. Crime Against Nature, meet The
Sum of Two Mothers, it’s time we all meet up over here where Dennis Etzel
Jr. is making the magic happen for us!
You will hear in him with me the voice of a poet we have been waiting to
hear, and glad we finally found him!
—CA Conrad, A
Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon: New (Soma)tics
Rarely does a poem do as much in as few words
as Dennis Etzel Jr.’s Sum of Two Mothers.
It is a complete mini-autobiography in verse — but one that leaves ample room
for the reader’s imagination. The poem’s supple, continuous syntax,
plain-spoken musicality, architectural lines, and ample white space deftly
convey both what is said and experienced, as well as what is not said or talked
about. Reading Dennis Etzel, Jr.’s work is like reading William Carlos
Williams, if Williams had had Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas as mothers.
—Joseph Harrington, Things Come On: An Amneoir
Dennis Etzel Jr’s The
Sum of Two Mothers wades open-wounded into the unfriendly waters of a
society bent on strangle-holding natural love and motherhood into pat
definitions: “she was a mother before I thought of her / as my ‘other mother,’
// or ‘another mother’ because ‘mother’ / for me is hard to define.” In tones
questioning, unsure, and ultimately defiant, these poems gather together in
representation of the complexity of familial love. The Sum of Two Mothers is an imperative story, and one that is cast
in lines intuitive, melodic, and resonant.
—Leah Sewell, Birth in Storm
