"There's nothing in this world
I don't want."
- Sass Brown, "Wildcat Canyon"
We suppose this applies to us as much as anyone we know. But it also occurs to us that there is nothing more American than all that. We want it all and we think we deserve it. Why this occurs to us at the moment is in relation to the poetry collections we have just consumed, or to paraphrase the poet Mark Strand, and by extension the Greg Santos, the poetry we have been eating and the resulting happiness that has accompanied it.
All of which is to say that we were honored, if not outright geeked, to attend the 2015 Devil's Kitchen Literary Festival, and spend time with so many talented authors, including, but not limited to - and yes we are thinking of the Megan Milks - the poets we read, ate and ran with - Sass Brown, David Tomas Martinez and Lisa Fay Coutley.
It is in their respective collections - USA-1000, Hustle and errata - that we started thinking about America. Or what America looks like in 2015 anyway. A mash-up of love and family, sex and immigrants, gender, pornography, pop culture, race, parenting, humor and violence. The fight for self-awareness. Grappling with trying to understand our true, and truest, identity. And how the good people of Devil's Kitchen - we're thinking of you Allison Joseph and Jon Tribble - may or may not have consciously sought to present this vision of America, but they have, and it is available, all of it, to all of us and sure to change lives.
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