Yeah! I’ve just received the second blurb for Branding Girls forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. In the summer of 2007 I was lucky enough to take a poetry workshop at the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference from Bruce Bond. What I remember best from Bruce’s workshop is the way he had a positive thing to say about every poem, a difficult thing when any given workshop draws a variety of experiences, talents, practices, and styles. This workshop included MFA students, PhD students, stay-at-home-moms, Saturday poets, retired individuals, and many, many others. Bruce also gave us take home assignments each night of the five day workshop, a poetry prompt we were to attempt before the next class. He opened the class with a request for volunteers to read their poems. A student would read his/her poem while Bruce would close his eyes and listen attentively. After the poem was read once, Bruce would say, “Read it again.” The student would and Bruce would offer a critique/positive comment after the second reading.

Students were given a thirty minute individual tutorial with the poet. For mine, I brought in a several poems from Branding Girls (before, mind you, I knew they would be Branding Girls’ poems). I specifically remember Bruce’s thoughtful comments on the poem “Dead Girl Brand,” a poem that responds to several images from Melanie Pullen‘s series High Fashion Crime Scenes, and a poem that was later published by Margie.

Bruce was a great teacher! And, he’s amazing poet. At the conference, I bought his wonderful book Radiography (BOA Editions), which includes my favorite poem ever written about a pomegranate. I recently finished his newest book Peal (Etruscan Press, 2009), a poetry collection filled with music.

Here’s Bruce Bond on Branding Girls:

Laura Madeline Wiseman’s brave new book, Branding Girls, offers us a mercurial and unflinching exploration of the commodification of the body, reduced to a vessel of projections, to a commercial brand, naturally, but also wearing the brand, the wound of the animal possessed. And with possession comes the animation, the childlike doll-play, the habitation by foreign spirits. Part of the power and pathos of these investigations lies in their restraint and tonal complexity, the asbestos of their wit, the intelligence of detail that illuminates even as it mystifies the closeness with which objectification haunts the desiring imagination. A rare thing. This book will widen the gaze that reads it.

I’m working on getting the blurbs for Branding Girls. I just received the first one from Jehanne Dubrow, an amazing poet who also attended PhD school at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I was lucky enough to speak to her on the phone when I was considering applying to the program. By the time I arrived at UNL, she was finished with her coursework and comprehensive exams and well on her way to graduation. However, we were both lucky enough to have lunch with the late Lucille Clifton who was the visiting poet at UNL in March 2007. I have read all of Jehanne’s three books (Stateside, From the Fever-World, The Hardship Post), and one chapbook (The Promised Bride). She is prolific and talented, to say the least. Don’t believe me? Check out Lauren Winner’s review of Stateside on Books and Culture.

Here’s Jehanne‘s blurb:

“Brand: as in a mark. Branded: as in burned on an animal, a criminal, someone enslaved. Branding: as in a trademarking, a commodification. In Laura Madeline Wiseman’s terrifying Branding Girls, the poet demonstrates that our femininity is defined by advertising, name brands, and material desires. From the figure of the Japanese “elevator girls,” we learn that contemporary women are in danger of becoming a series of negations: ‘Not geisha. Not madams… / Not call girls / or masseuses. Not school girls / in pleated skirts.’ I love this collection for the same reasons I love TV’s “Mad Men”: its elegance, its dark humor, and its pain.”

Wow. Thank you, Jehanne.