The title of this post comes from one of Jessie Janeshek’s poems from her latest chapbook, Channel U. The cover features Maila Nurmi (better known as Vampira) dressed as a witch for Halloween, with her companion dressed as a post-car-crash James Dean.
Our final chapbook of last year’s “season” is our third by Ms. Janeshek. At this point, what more can we tell you? Jessie describes her poetry as “feminist, probing the connections among sex, power, and violence—frequently explored through the broken promise of Hollywood’s ‘golden age’ and its shadow side film noir—while examining, challenging, and sometimes reappropriating patriarchal culture’s complex relationship with powerful women, especially when those women are too beautiful yet never beautiful enough.” I asked her to describe Channel U, and she wrote that it “fuses personal and cultural nostalgia—or maybe anti-nostalgia—to examine and disrupt girlhood and womanhood in small-town America from the ’50s through the ’90s. ‘Screaming relaxes me so,’ Vampira used to say, sipping from a smoking goblet as she introduced that night’s cheap horror flick.” Take a drink and tune in.
From “Bombshell Planchette/Why Can’t You Manage Platinum?”
“Makeup makes the lie and I’m afraid of your bleach
my legs/the trees open. To motivate myself
I dream Kim Novak
white lights in the clouds
the self-control suicide note.”
Check the title page and pick up a copy. It goes great with her other two chapbooks!