I am very excited about my forthcoming –just days now, volume of new and selected poetry! “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code“! (from Persea Books!)
I haven’t had a new book since 2006, and Tokyo Butter!
Tokyo Butter – a search for forms of Dierdre (really my late cousin Hilda).
The cover image is really a 50X USB microscpe scan I made of flowers from Hilda’s Funneral in 2002. I grew up with Hilda as if she were my sister… A terrible loss for me…
I wonder what she would be like now? She was only 3 months older than me, born 25 November 1953; I was born 27 February 1954. “Tokyo Butter” explores some of that… I couldn’t believe that all of Hilda (“Deirdre” in the book) was gone from the world, and “Tokyo Butter” is the outcome of my (as yet incomplete) search for her.
Here is a version of a video piece I made about a poem in “Tokyo Butter“: The Cultue of Snowmen”:
I really want the Proscope mobile! Oh what I would capture!
Images I captured with my Proscope Digital microscope:
:
Hope you’ve already put in your orders at Amazon for “Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code“!
Video poam I made, the source of the title of this book soon to be available:
Also, please check out my Amazon Author Page!!
You can hear me reading three of my favorite poems from”Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code” for Poets and Writers Here:
http://www.pw.org/content/wannabe_hoochie_mama_gallery_of_realities_red_dress_code
The three poems I read:
- Blue Coming
- The Glory Prelude
- Me and Bubble Went to Memphis
Also here “Me and Bubble Went to Memphis” here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/audio/detail/76019
The Glory Prelude video poam here (music composed and performed by Graphic Artist Ansted Moss, Vocals by Thylias Moss who also made the vide poam; contains footage of my mother who has recently been visited by “The Angel of the Lord” –whatever that means. I cannot compete with “The Angel of the Lord” –noone can):
(my mother is unaware that this footage was captured)
Please don’t tell her, unless you are “The Angel of the Lord”.
she already told me that she’s coming to get me… –I am going to be haunted after her death, so if I make no further posts, you will know that:
- I am dead
- My mother got me.
- My mother succeeded at what Houdini couldn’t
- A mother’s love
How mama looks now, as she waits for The Angel of the Lord (to come back in ways my deceased father can’t):
(She loves Popeye’s chicken, but isn’t supposed to eat it. Diabetes, Hypertension, Glaucoma, Thyroid problems, loss of the ability to grasp physical objects (with her right hand especially) and to remember anything, Dementia; loss of hearing, loss of eyesight, unless looking at and/or listening to: “The Angel of the Lord”, but she’s coming back to get me, a promise she has made to the “Angel of the Lord” –I take this most seriously, because she saw “The Angel of the Lord” as real as anything she has ever seen..
“The Glory Prelude to a Widow Shrine System” is for her, the widow since the death of my father in July 1980. She says “the only man I need is Jesus”, so I called a man I liked a lot, before I loved him as I do now, “Jésus”. My mama with dementia, (I love her, but she still doesn’t know. Just wanted to tell her that I had found a good man; I thought that maybe she would like that. But no.
I’ve been divorced since 2013, but makes no difference… Even if nothing goes any furher, I just wanted her to know that I had found someone much better, who doesn’t lie to me, a man I can trust to tell me the truth, whether or not I like it. He will not deceive me, the most trustworthy man I know.
and “Hypnosis at the Bird Factory ” (also in “Wannabe”) as a video poam right here:
and Tornado Pi, video poem version of the print poem “Tornados“ also in “Wannabe“:
Print version of “The Glory Prelude” in The Offing here:
BUY THE BOOK!
READ THE BOOK!
A significant new poem from this collection is: “Higginson Matters in Magnificent Culture of Myopia” and I perform this signture poem from this collection here
(the unnatural emphasis on the word “moss” comes from a niece of my ex, telling me that I could hardly be moving on with my life, since I still had their name, a name they did not copyright, a name they did not intiate; there are many other “Mosses”; they have no valid claim to the exclusivity of that name:
Speaking of things “trustworthy”, I was all set to believe that an unfortunae sitution with my publisher was greatly improved; I’m still all set for that, but I was disappointed when I saw on the publisher’s website for my book; a quote about me, this mixed-race woman who would never choose a partner based on his color, or a partner who would choose a woman based on her color; I would not exist without mixing…
and although the quote which offends me now and all that I’ve tried to accomplish in my writing is gone from the book jacket, I still name, on the website, “the black truths behind white lies” and am still a writer “who speaks bitterness”… I was disappoined to see that, because of the inaccuracy, and immediaetely wote an email to my poetry editor
That is not who I am; I speak TRUTH, no matter what color it is. And if “black” (a part of me but not all of me) is so powerful that whatever is “black” at all, even a tiny potent, powerful drop; if so powerful that I can not avoid using a black lens to interpret everything, then everything I see automatically becomes “black” because I see it, and everything I say automatically become “black” because I say it, and everything I hear automatically becomes “black” because I hear it, and everything I do, automatically becomes “black” because I do it, and everything I touch automatically becomes “black” because I “touch” it, and everything I feel automatically becomes “black,”because I feel it, and everthing I eat automatically becomes “black” because I eat it,
then there is no need for me to preface anything I think; anything I feel, anything I do with “black” since I cannot do anything that is not black, so when I think of quantum phyiscs, quantum physics becomes black; every form of math, everything I’ve written here is black; that’s how potent black is, one drop and black heaven is the reward!
I continue to think these black thoughts, as I thought them at the University of new Hampshire where in a class for those teaching English composition, the subject was “How To Eliminate Vagueness” in student wiring, and one TA observed that when a sudent writes the word, “black”, the student likely means something else, such as, and this was agreed upon (worth noting that I was the ony visibly “black” person in the room); agreed upon that the student meant “irreversible damage” , so I wrote this poem, for instructors of English 401 at the University of New Hampshire, originally published in Callaloo, then in my book, Pyramid of Bone, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award:
about Pyramid of bone, Langdon Hammer says this:
Although many of Moss’s poems discuss race and gender, these subjects are, explains scholar Langdon Hammer, simply “starting points for her work…her poetry makes such facts of identity seem unfamiliar, their meanings not to be predicted, unavailable to the naked eye.” Known for startling metaphors and vivid imagery, Moss’s work demonstrates an expansive imagination that seeks to connect at times wildly disparate subjects”
Book by Thylias Moss
“To Eliminate Vagueness”
instructions: substitute irreversible damage for black wherever it occurs
In the red-legged locust’s black raids upon midwest soybeans,
in their illicit transmission of tapeworms and parasites
to quail, turkeys, and guinea fowl,
in all the black calendar days that are supposed
to indicate the ordinary.
In operating rooms body parts black with gangrene
are excised and trash cans seem to fill with dead crows.
There’s a black crust two miles thick in Soweto, some on bread,
around eyes, most on the streets where blood dried
into its own monument.
Then my mother’s black face nothing can soften, the sweating,
the forgetting to sleep, the solidarity with anyone troubling,
the compassion only I knew she felt hugging a radio, singing
spirituals, sequestering herself in her widow’s bedroom
praying for women unable to pray.
And what of Europeans, what of Asians and Latinos who are
irreversibly
damaged, whose gangrened minds should be excised but who are
not black?
One day I noticed my mother had poured her face onto mine
and had given me spirituals and lullabies.
I sang them when baskets of black clouds dumped
their transparent flowers over the convent
and the nuns’ basic black didn’t get wet
and they carted the flowers home in wheelbarrows
and arranged them like lullabies
and wept silently
as we were weeping, mother and daughter together
in my father’s old rocker, the damage already done.
for Gary and the English 401 staff
Thylias Moss
Originally published many years ago in Callaloo, then in my award-winning collection “Pyramid of Bone” (University of Virginia Press, 1989)
and listen to me read, on the Poetry Foundation site: “The Pampering of Leora”
and this video poam (product of act[s] of making) I made”Cosmic Seduction” is just another black thing I do:
Please enjoy as much of this truth as you can. I thank you and am grateful, always.
___________
Included for someone special
all for him
His if he wants it, the most trustworthy, most deserving man I know.
Thylias Moss Writing 