Join us for an evening with poets
Daryl Gussin & James Norman
to discuss their latest collections
Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand
&
How to Set Yourself on Fire and Call It Art
to be held at Solid State Books on H St. NE
Tickets are available here!
Join us for an evening with poets Daryl Gussin and James Norman to celebrate their new collections, Shake Hands with the Man in My Hand and How to Set Yourself on Fire and Call It Art.
"Daryl Gussin seamlessly tackles the social, political, and personal in a way that perfectly blurs the lines between the three, leaving the reader with an understanding that these lines don't really exist."
-Buddah, Razorcake #152
How to Set Yourself on Fire and Call It Art, the fifth collection by James Norman focuses on his relationship with activism. Don’t worry, no billboards were harmed in the making of this book.
With a passion, Daryl Gussin has been awkwardly standing around at punk shows for the last twenty-something years. Thankfully at some point in his late teens he decided to become a little more productive, and has been working on zines, setting up shows, and playing in bands since then. In 2006, he became integrally involved in Razorcake fanzine where he is currently the managing editor. His writing revolves around the honest, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant aspects of counterculture and its flavorful inhabitants. The heartbreaks, the implosions, and the defiant victories. Community over commercialism, create and destroy.
James Norman assumes the open road would recall his name. Musician, part-time lover—a heterodoxical historian of the forgotten, a half-assed Buddhist in his concrete monastery, a traveling freak show feeding LSD to a higher consciousness—Contradictions are the meat on the bones that construct him. James Norman was born to a Navy Man, and the sea never quite left him. His mother was the son of a preacher, though no God has ever claimed him. His mountain is too tall for flags anyway. He has lived in cabins surrounded by forests of marijuana, in that steel onion called ship bobbing across the Atlantic, in squalid houses owned by unscrupulous men chasing the Almighty American Dollar far past the point of no return. He owes everything to the women in his life, starting with Jean. He is a lover of animals (even the human kind.) He hopes you enjoy his musings about Armageddon, though he believes that inevitably we make it out alive to tell the story ourselves. I suppose he believes in the story more than anything else. Most of his poems are instructions for how to survive the desert of self for long enough to understand the thirst that drives us, and he wrote them solely to make it through till morning.