MY DAILY ACTIONS, or THE METEORITES (Fordham University Press, 2020)
Best Poetry of 2020, The New York Times
Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award for Trans & Gender-Variant Literature
Foreword by Cathy Park Hong, Judge of the 2019 Poets Out Loud Prize
Cover image by Howardena Pindell
Order it from the press or from White Whale Bookstore
Please contact me for signed copies, review copies, or event inquiries
Excerpts: 1, 2
Read a critical essay in Jacket2 about MDAotM & “the domestic life of queer gender”
“Poems of fear and foreboding that live with the knowledge of climate crisis, without resorting to self-righteousness or self-flagellation…built of elusive, mysteriously fascinating sentences”
—The New York Times
“In this gentle and devastating record of a life, Corfman highlights and distorts the real to transmit a remarkable interior world, intricate with questions of selfhood, affect, and the mortality that transforms and binds humanity.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Corfman writes necessary narratives into being…In this world, every event is but a brief flare, a sign of impending disaster and a stark, startling beauty that thrives nonetheless.”
—RHINO
“The structure of Corfman's poems shines here…as if trying to literally box in and contain the disorder and confusion with which the author is grappling.”
—Pittsburgh City Paper
“transcendent…The collection’s resonance, then, isn’t in Corfman’s surreal and often, sultry, command of language. It’s in the private-made-public symbology of the speaker’s day-to-day…”
—Up the Staircase Quarterly
“reading these poems will stand you up, and rereading these poems will walk you to where they baptize gravity with birdthings…I am grateful for the alien commonalities of Corfman’s verse as they survive earthly inquiry and require that one be either awake to humanness or be at peace among predicted creatures…”
—isacoustic*
From Cathy Park Hong’s foreword:
“…an exquisitely crafted account of a vanishing world. Reminiscent of Lyn Hejinian’s My Life for our anthropocene era, Corfman writes mesmerizing sentences that can stand on their own, like messages in a bottle washed up from our ever expanding sea.”
Advance praise:
“…this generous, remarkable book might “hold the dysphoria in a clean line,” but it refuses to reconcile multiplicity and variance with normativity.”
—Brian Teare
“…one of the most distinctive poetic journals I’ve read in that it expanded my already quite ‘out there’ ideas of the ordinary. Welcome to the incredibly true life of poets…Let Corfman be the poet in your ear offering a little magic to thrive.”
—Stacy Szymaszek
“These poems are stark and tender compressions that artfully and achingly reckon with what is imminent, what is private, and what is unknown…”
—Yona Harvey
LUXURY, BLUE LACE (Autumn House, 2019)
Chosen by Richard Siken for the 2018 Rising Writer Prize
Order the audio book or paperback from Autumn House, Bookshop, or the independent bookstore I grew up with, Women & Children First.
(Excerpt) (Trailer) (Radio Feature)
(Interview with the Waves Breaking podcast for trans & genderqueer poets)
“An extraordinary debut…a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.”
—Publishers Weekly starred review
“Corfman transforms while transforming the poem…this poet has mastered the craft”
—Washington Independent Review of Books
“With deft use of the sequence, the prose poem, and the couplet…Luxury, Blue Lace is a forceful debut collection”
—Quarterly West
“The poem’s in LBL stay in the reader’s mind long after the final page”
—The Adroit Journal
“I think of the collection as an Agnes Martin painting: beautiful in how it distorts our notions of simplicity.”
—the Blake Quarterly blog
“Some reaction takes place, and suddenly rich meaning springs from a scatter”
—QueerPGH
“Expansive, generous, deeply considered, and highly lyric, this book, with its transformations and overlaps, astounds.”
—Richard Siken
“The poems linger beautifully on these delicate, precise precipices of knowing and unknowing, and the wet mouth of the desire to remake, never tipping over into folly or disarray. Instead, they are graceful. And so tender. As if holding one’s own self in a cradle. Think of Susan Howe’s “curved, odd, indefinite, irregular, feminine language,” or, in Corfman’s words, “a deeply textured skin,” and you’ll get close to knowing the sensate world of these ravishing poems”
—Dawn Lundy Martin
“This stunning, canny debut…fixates on the self out-of-sequence, that belies sequence, but that yearns, anyhow, to be known. As such, it enacts a queer kind of recovery, mining the past for what glimmers, half-submerged, in order to glimpse future possibility. At once luxuriously lyric and theoretically rich, attuned to the heady ambivalence of gender, genre, and time”
—Cameron Awkward-Rich
METEORITES (DoubleCross Press, 2018)
OUT OF PRINT
Finalist, Chautauqua Janus Prize for Innovative Prose
Recommended Reading from Tinderbox Editions, Bloof Books, Knife | Fork | Book
