I'll miss you Wendi

Wendi Kaufman passed away yesterday after a long battle with cancer. The Washingtonian posted a brief piece about Wendi. For those of you who read my Cackling Jackal blog, you may remember her as The Happy Booker.

Wendi was funny, warm and incredibly generous. Not just with other writers, but with everyone who crossed her path. She often volunteered her time to worthy causes. Truly someone who gave to her community. She was a huge support to me early on by giving me a monthly poetry column and the space to write about whatever I wanted, however I wanted. She went out of her way to connect me with other writers and literary folks. Simply because she was a wonderful, selfless person. This was something she did for countless writers.

Also, Wendi was a talented fiction writer herself. Her first collection of stories, Helen on 86th Street and Other Stories, from Stillhouse Press is coming out this Fall. You should pre-order it.

The last time I saw Wendi was two summers ago, she was in remission and positively beaming. She talked about her new appreciation for her health, the changes she made in her life and how good it felt not to be sick anymore. Then a few weeks later I heard from a neighbor that her cancer returned. I didn't want to believe it. No, no, Wendi overcame cancer, I insisted.

Wendi is survived by her husband and their two teenage sons.

3 Good Books

Here I suggest "3 Good Books" on Oracles and Dreams at Push Pull Books.

And lots of other good book suggestions where that came from.

Speaking of oracles, the Bibliomancy Oracle now offers over 2500 prophecies.

And the final Bombyonder blurb is . . .

Bombyonder is a book of beautiful ancestors, not least of which is Gertrude Stein. Like Stein, Reb Livingston is concerned with large and small disruptions: small disruptions of the sentence, large disruptions of the world. The language is volatile, gleaming, and round. It goes off when you least expect it.

— Patricia Lockwood, author of Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals

----

Yay! 

Bombyonder comes out in October from Bitter Cherry Books.

Blurb for Bombyonder

Some kind of war happened at some time or another and continued for quite some time to come. So begins Bombyonder, Reb Livingston’s blistering, kaleidoscopic, post-bomb-blast shrapnel-storm of a book. Bombs, masks, machinery, birds buried at the bottoms of women, emerge and recede in the blistering landscape. You ride in a vehicle with a thousand gears, each ratcheting the velocity upward. You will encounter Mrs. Butterworth, Home Depot, Rapunzel, Facebook, Leona Helmsley and countless others in a blur of narratives, dreams, texts and diary entries. When you reach for your seat belt, which you will, you will come up with Medusa’s snakes in your clenched hands. But Bombyonder is not merely a scathing, slicingly funny assemblage. Livingston devises a pulsing, haywire logic that somehow rivets the parts to each other and the reader to the page. Through the marvel of her language, the book becomes a shimmering whole; a miracle met like the first mirror. Bombyonder transcends any sense of “experimentation,” and occupies, essentially, its own genre. I came from a long line of fuses Livingston’s central character reports. Leave your cardboard containers at the door. Bring your own oxygen. You cannot be ready or more ready. The narrator tells us: Between a gauntlet of opposing dogs, she walked between two lines.This was her path. Livingston has delivered a fabulous, mind bending book. Honestly, I do not know how she survived the writing of it.

— Lindsay Hill, author of Sea of Hooks