You guys. YOU GUYS. I have the best news.
You all know Amy, right? Y’know, Amy–she writes lovely reviews for us and invented the DEATH MATCH (which we will bring back, I promise–it’s just on hiatus, not gone forever):
I am pleased and joyous and bursting with pride to tell you that OUR AMY wrote a book. Did I tell you that already? Well, I’m telling you again, because today is a special day. Today is the day that Amy’s book hit the market. It’s on sale now! RIGHT NOW. It comes in ebook format for $3.99, OR the paperback version is on sale right now for $7.99. (I ordered one of each. Because I love Amy THE MOST. Also, I am the most proud of her.)
What is this magical book? It’s a book of poetry!
WAIT NO COME BACK!
Out of True is a slim volume of poetry, 98 pages. This is what Amy said about the book:
“It’s 20 years in the making and has poetry from the past twenty years of my life. A little bit from here, a little bit from there. Hopefully (if I’ve done my job) you shouldn’t be able to tell the difference. There are poems about a little bit of everything: magic and zombies and summer and trees and Diogenes and Delilah and snow and love and loss. Something for everyone, hopefully.”
In other words, it’s Amy bound up in pages (or kilobytes). She was awesome enough to send over a poem so you could read it and see how not-scary her poetry is. Because um, clearly? I can’t review this book. I am insanely biased and I would tell you to go buy like fifty copies if I wrote a review. Y’all know I try to keep it real when reviewing, so instead, here is a sample for you to read:
Downed Wires
Last night you came to me and told me
to stop looking. You were older
than I remember you. You would be,
of course; a lifetime has passed.
I still recognized you, but barely.
It was your eyes that clued me in, and the
hesitancy with your hands when you speak.
You still do that.
You smelled of the lake where you used
to spend your summers
and of exhaustion, high, hot, electric. The air
thrummed between us. I put out my hand
and relished the shock. Our
hair flickers like seaweed in the charged air.
Let me go, you said. Let me go
and you’ll be free. The sound
of water lapped lazy in the background.
I watched your eyes for a sign. Your words
weight me like stones in my pockets.
The boy you were runs past us
in the background, calling over
his shoulder. This is where I’ll be,
when I go, he says.
Find me. Come and find me.
Not finding something
doesn’t mean you’ve stopped looking.
Let me go, you say, but you know I won’t.
You grip my wrist in panic, a circlet of fire,
and I burn to ash.
Your eyes both judge me and thank me.
I live in the intersection of this Venn diagram.
I mindlessly trace the path like a labyrinth.
My feet know the way. To walk outside
would be madness.
To walk outside would be to lose you.
To walk outside would be to lose myself.
(blinks) I’m a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves.
In other news, we also have our last giveaway. Now, I’m sorry that people who have already won giveaways have not yet received their prizes. THEY ARE COMING. (I know nobody has gotten them? Because I have been very busy and I haven’t gotten to send them. I’m way sorry. Things have been hectic in Casa del Rodarme. I haven’t even been able to tweet much as much as usual, which, we all know I basically live on Twitter. One day, I didn’t get to tweet at all and I think I almost had a seizure or something.)
This giveaway is a special giveaway, and I’ve decided it’s only going to be open to people that have been following us. That having been said, there’s no way for me to tell you whether or not you should enter. It’s safe to say that if you’ve been here for awhile, even if you don’t comment much, you can enter this giveaway. I don’t have any way to check to see if people have been reading us, so I’m going to trust y’all on the honor system. (Basically, if you found us through this post that someone RT’d, please, don’t enter this one. We do lots of giveaways! You can enter the next one, I promise!)
The reason that I want it to be open just to people who have been following us is that it’s kind of a personal giveaway. Amy, Rob and I have put together a trio of books that are meaningful or special to us; each book was selected by a separate bookslut, so they don’t really go together thematically or anything. Rob chose Interview with the Vampire; I chose Naked by David Sedaris; Amy chose The Moon is Always Female by Marge Piercy. After we chose and acquired the books, we shamelessly defaced them.
Defaced?!
Yep. We wrote in the books. The books are full of notes from us to you.
My hope is that it kind of feels like you get to read books that we love along with us, which is why I only want it to be open to people who, y’know, know us. I don’t think that other people would probably even want to read books that we’ve scribbled in, heh. It would be strange. (Also, this is my actual copy of Naked that I’ve used here. The one I’ve owned for ten years or so and carted all around the country with me. I love you guys THAT MUCH. For realsies.)
Note: I failed to put a deadline on this, so I am making Sunday, August 12 the deadline. 11:59pm Eastern, as usual.
So, if you’d like to win the Insatiable Bookslut Trio of Defaced Books, please drop a comment down below and tell me you’re in! Do not forget, also, to swing by and check out Amy’s new book! WE LOVE YOU AMY!
P.S. Sorry if I seem a little cracked out writing this post. It’s because I am SO EXCITE. And also I just woke up. AND ALSO–wait no, that’s all.
What is it time for, my bookslutty friends? A GIVEAWAY, that’s what! We are giving away our copy of The Earthquake Machine by Mary Pauline Lowry. After