GENRE FLUID

marketing & genre: let us have it all! the containers aren't working anymore!

This is a regular, once a month story: last week I had a reviewer interested in a book (one I specifically didn’t genre-label in my pitch because I come to play) until they opened the ARC and saw “POEMS” in bold on the cover. I got the dreaded, “Ack! I only review fiction and nonfiction.”

(This reviewer could have very well loved poetry in their free time, but could only place reviews (particularly for payment) for fiction and nonfiction. I didn't ask for backstory, but I try not to assume that the very word “poems” gives people the ick. There are lots of reason for the ick from schooling to this idea that poetry is “harder to understand” than fiction or nonfiction, but that’s not what this newsletter is about).

meme created by Zoe Aline-Howard, a genius

I’m working on two books at the moment labeled with the scandalous “P” for poetry, that could easily be identified in another genre camp.

The first is Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s forthcoming book EXPLODING HEAD, which Cynthia calls a “memoir in prose poems” but says “POEMS” as bold as her name on the cover.

When I read EXPLODING HEAD for the first time, I was walking on the treadmill and reading while taking notes. It was the perfect reading experience for me because the collection had me in tizzy. Hoffman is in the pocket of her interior, so gutsy, so needle-prickling, reading the poems is like discovering a rash traveling up your arm. I can say with full confidence, it’s the best book I’ve read on the manifestation of spiraling (as in anxiety) on the page. It is a story of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.

While poetry is an apt category for this collection, the tight, fully-justified text boxes (practically hemmed into perfect little rectangles) could easily be considered flash memoir, vignettes, memoir shorts (if you’re not subscribed to Short Reads, here’s your chance), micro essay, creative nonfiction, short form, sudden memoir, and postcards.

The second is Jenny Irish’s forthcoming book HATCH which says “POEMS” underneath the title on the cover I cannot yet show you, and is the story of how a metal womb gains consciousness and goes on the run.

NOT THE COVER, JUST FOR FUN!!

I would describe this book as “Hybrid” rather than poems, but hybrid books, oomph. It’s like a calling card saying “don’t pick me!” to general audiences and “pick me! pick me!” to readers like me.

HATCH is disgusting, it’s horror, it’s elegy, it’s epic, it’s prophecy, it’s technological, it’s literary but speculative, it’s prose poems or flash fiction, it’s science and pseudoscience, it’s conspiracy theory and the last flailing tentacle of capitalism, it’s reproductive justice and birth history, it’s BLEAK and FUNNY and SARCASTIC and WITTY, and if a plastic surgeon watched me read this book they would be horrified at the number of wrinkle lines from facial movement it caused. It’s apocalyptic, but not like Emily St. John Mendel, like Maine fisherman (where Jenny is from) and the narration of Oryx and Crake and honestly, my favorite part, is that it lives—does it breathe?—at the intersection of caretaking and artificial intelligence. Did you know there was an intersection there? Well, now you do. Read the book.

What makes both of these books fascinating is that my list of authors and titles in conversation with them defies genre constraints.

EXPLODING HEAD is just as much Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” (short story) as it is Jessica Gross’ Hysteria (novel) and Kimberly King Parson’s Black Light (stories), and a bit of The Collected Schizophrenias from Esmé Weijun Wang (memoir). In form it could be Heating and Cooling by Beth Ann Fennelly, but with the urgency (& propulsion) of a thriller. It made me feel electric the way Sylvia Plath’s journals do, or reading Flowers in the Attic shocked me as a teen. As a fan of David Naimon’s introductions, this list of JoAnna Novak blurbs reminds me of Cynthia’s book. It’s like the feeling of seeing the rolling saw at the top of a log flume ride before the big drop.

“Dara Wier says of her [JoAnna Novak’s] second poetry collection Abeyance, North America, “Maybe what Novak offers is an ink-sputtered, blood-marked, chewed, dog-soothed, mutter-fluffed, shoe-bored, convertible couch on which to lie around and dream up seeking and satisfying appetites,” and Sandra Simonds adds, “Where is desire located? Is the body a ledge, a bookshelf, a devil, an animal? Like Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, these poems invite us to understand that the erotic is frantic, pulled in multiple directions, that it doesn’t know if it wants to climb a forty-foot date palm or soak in a hotel’s hot tub. But perhaps like language itself, in the end, desire has no true home and in order for it to stay alive, it has to keep moving and these poems give us beautiful glimpses of that movement.”

Novak’s 2021 follow-up, her debut short-story collection Meaningful Work won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. “Devouring, yearning, erasing, grabbing,” says Aimee Bender, “These stories pulse with intensity and Novak’s scalpel-precise prose cuts to the core again and again. A startling and exciting collection that does not shirk from pretty much anything.”

(Are you kidding me that I’ve never heard of JoAnna Novak before this interview and THESE are the blurbs to her books?)

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Jenny Irish’s HATCH is absolutely for fans of Our Wives Under the Sea, but also K-Ming Chang, a sprinkle of Climate by Julie Carr and Lisa Olstein, and a little drippy/trippy in terms of “possibly vampiric” like The Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilonovich. And as Jenny recently told me, HATCH, like all her other books, contains cannibalism—so, Tender Is the Flesh if it had a plot. HATCH is so smelly! It encapsulates how I felt pushing a placenta out AFTER pushing a whole baby—awe, uncanny, nauseous, next-two-hundred-levels-uncomfortable.

When I told Zoe about it she said, “I can tell how much you love this.” And I do. Anytime a book makes me get on the Google and do my own little research project, I want to devour it. It’s like my own little Depths of Wikipedia. I didn’t know the history of forceps, but after reading HATCH, I sure know enough to keep myself up at night.

It is both a treasure to call EXPLODING HEAD and HATCH books of poems (read more poetry!), but it’s dissatisfying too from a marketing standpoint. How often do you hear Scott Simon (of NPR) interviewing a poet? Every national newspaper has a “spot” for poetry (usually reviewed in a cluster or thematic grouping, or excerpted at the end of a newsletter), but the “regular reviews” go to fiction and nonfiction. And I get it, the general reader, the Target book club, the academics, but what a disservice to readers that the categories with which we review and place books into little containers (that quite frankly NEVER EVER FIT) trumps the stylistic, overlapping adventures of said books. The fluidity! Let us have it!

And sometimes we are allowed these books in BIG, FLASHY places as a little treat.

My advice would be to study the copy, campaigns, and movements on books like Northwood, The Book of X, Linea Nigra, Bright Archive, or the careers of authors like Elissa Gabbert, Max Porter, Elissa Washuta, and Jenny Boully, or many, many, many Graywolf and Counterpoint titles to figure out how to move novellas, translations, and hybrid books. I would say Maggie Nelson but I think every MFA candidate in the US believes they’ve discovered Bluets.

Full Stop is a great place to find books that live on the margins and the in-betweens (LARB used to be like this, but they seem more commercial now—who will be next, I would love to send you books!). I do feel like the book coverage at Full Stop is unparalleled for the breath and depth of non-traditional titles and non-traditional presses. And the writing is ALWAYS good.

How marketing squashes genre fluidity:

Now, it’s true, poetry is the most cursed genre when it comes to pied-pipering readers and critics who don’t dip their toe in the fountain of poetic youth, but genre fluidity is a red flag to so many parts of the book publishing process that it’s meant to be crushed in the book-making & selling process.

• BISAC codes (“the industry standard in categorization). These are the subject headings with which the supply chain (& libraries & bookstores organize books). These subject headings are the back fielding to internal databases at your library and bookstores, and they even “inactivate" BISAC codes.

• Industry reviews. Kirkus doesn’t review poetry. Publisher’s Weekly does, but they tend to run reviews late(r). Shelf Awareness has this column “The Writer’s Life” where they feature poets, but they don’t really review poetry collections, NPR used to have a brilliant poetry reviewer, Jeevika Verma, but since she’s left, their poetry coverage hasn’t recovered. Library Journal does review poetry, but they “may review several months after publication date.” Foreword Reviews does review poetry, but typically via Clarion Reviews which is a fee-to-review service.

• Glossy mags. Your glossy magazines (Bustle, Nylon, Vogue) very rarely support poets or poetry unless it’s in a monthly list or a National Poetry Month feature. Everybody loves a National Poetry Month features, which also encourages presses to publish their collections in the Spring every year, usually timed with AWP and National Poetry Month in mind.

• National reviews. I just want to have a look at the New York Times formula for reviewing books, just a teensy look, or else places that review books trusted by “general readers.”

• Events. If I had a nickel for every time someone told me events don’t sell books. And yes, every writer has that moment where two people (or no one) comes to an event they’ve booked, BUT I would argue that strategically planned events, events with great conversations, events for the right audience, events at a bookstore you love, events in the right location do, in fact, sell books. Poets sell books at events. Now, a book tour across the US in places you’ve never been and will never return—your team probably doesn’t want to coordinate that, no. The thing about weird and wonderful books though, they create weird and wonderful events.

• Covers. The marketing team has labeled a book in every possible aesthetic way before a reader has even read a single word. From covers, to stickers, to blurbs (must we insist that blurbs come from folks of the same genre—I want this “rule” to end, and I think it is), to whether or not it has a book club guide in the pages, to who gets the front cover quote and who is blurbed on the back, to the copy, to the subtitle.

• Subtitles. I had a debate last week with someone over “memoir” vs. “memoir-in-essays.” Subtitles are doing A LOT of work, whether they’re genre-defining or like Margo Steines’ Brutalities: A Love Story, arguably one of my favorite titles to ever live.

• Hardcover vs. paperback, are they doing both for your book, just hardcover, just paperback? Are libraries less likely to order it if it’s just paperback? (wear and tear). Is it an accessible price point in hardback? How many poetry collections or hybrid books do you own published in hardback?

• Word count. An agent will stop someone in their tracks on this one. Does the word count fit the genre’s range? Yes, books are published as outliers all the time but who wrote them and what’s the backstory?

• Shelves. Barnes & Noble, my local B&N—two floors of books—doesn’t even have a “memoir” shelf. “Essays?” we would be begging at this point. Many, many, many bookstores have no poetry at all. Chapbooks are taken less seriously because of their spine size (you can’t market that tiny little, sometimes wordless, spine on a bookstore shelf).

• Tropes. One thing I’ve watched become super successful for genre writers is tropes, which publishers are definitely using in copy to direct readers (particularly in the social media space). I wonder sometimes if we couldn’t use the trope formula to better match books and readers in other genres too. Can you imagine tropes for literary fiction? (My favorite would be “walks through a city thinking in run-on sentences”).

One of the smaller reasons I had to get out of agenting, (exposing myself here), is because my MFA thesis would never sell to a publisher I worked with as a literary agent. I couldn’t unsee that fact. The books I loved most would never sell in that space. Weird, innovative writing is happening at traditional publishers, but so much less often than it is in the independent space, and typically is published alongside strong platform, author name, big agent. And thus, we have Pine State.

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As always, the Pine State calendar of events lives here. Request books for review & interview & feature here, add yourself to our reviewer list here, and buy our books here! You can also contact us through our website, Pinestatepublicity.com.

ICYMI: Kate Doyle’s I MEANT IT ONCE was named a Best Short Story Collection of 2023 by Electric Literature and recently reviewed in Brown Daily Herald, Brutalities: A Love Story by Margo Steines was named a Best of by Airmail, a new excerpt from I WOULD MEET YOU ANYWHERE by Susan Kiyo Ito is in Nobb Hill Gazette, Beth Kephart on the “Observational Lens” for Literary Hub, Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s EXPLODING HEAD is reviewed on Verse Curious, Holly M. Wendt is on The Tease to talk debut novel HEADING NORTH, and so much more on our Twitter & Instagram.