A new poetry collection from Seven Dane Asmund, featuring work exploring the space left after a sibling dies, when you abandon yourself to find love, make that lucky connection, and lose it once more. A collection on loss and building yourself back up.
A few years ago, I was on estrogen. I was transforming. I was becoming, in a very real sense, myself. I began to see her in the mirror. Then I got the call.
Your sister is dying. Faster than we realized. We need to all be here.
And I didn't see her in the mirror anymore. I cut my hair. I stopped taking the pills. I began working out. I began fucking. I began drinking. I began dating. I began racing, faster and faster.
I've been a man. I've been a drunk. I've been a woman. I've been a dog.
And I wrote. I wrote so much. I wrote so much garbage I'm still sifting through to find the heart of it. The heart of this book. The heart of what I've been meaning by this lived work. In the curvature of my movements through all of this, the lusting and the dancing the drinking and the losing, there have been words in cursive. I'm finding them now, finally.
After Diana died, I was at the bar every night. And every night, I drank. And every night, I wrote. Lines in ink in my little black notebook. Crappy typo-fueled binges in my phone notes. I cried in public. It was gorgeous, probably, to a sad director. But it turns out because it was real, I didn't get the joy of seeing it as romantic or lovely, it was just kind of pathetic.
And then I dated and I stopped drinking and then I found love and then I started to transition again and I lost love and then I began being a dog on the weekends then I found lust. And finally I went back to the bar again and began drinking and it's not even a full circle, I find it's a constantly moving line.
This warm body of mine, molding like plastic, this shape, then that. All of which is to say, I'm putting it together into a book.
With an incredible cover by Reid Aster, Like Warm Plastic pulls you on my journey with me. A story told in poems. Tragedy, yes. Loss. A harsh objectivization of my body, of my sister's body, as I process what it means to lose someone. A stumbling out of womanhood into manhood, something I never felt at home in, but now yearned for. And a slide into sex, sweaty nights at the bars, and kink.
The book follows my descent into the mess of things, as the poems themselves begin to slide and turn and twist.
I am seeking just $1500. After fees, that's enough to print 250 copies and pay Kollapsar for the cover work, and the broadsides!
Since we made it to $2500, I'll work with Kollapsar to bring an older set of work to life again under a new cover, realizing my hole-obsessed poem "While Opening the Wound" and its followup "An Estrangement" in its own standalone pages.Â
I don't expect to make more money than this. Poetry is as poetry is. It was a constant refrain in school that we were writing poems for the three people in the center of the Earth who still read it. I appreciate you for being one of those three.
Like Warm Plastic
Like Warm Plastic Collection
A Signed Copy
The Three Books
All of the Poetry
Signed Poetry Hoard
*The Class Room Set is only for teachers. Due to the mature and explicit nature of many poems here, I'd suggest only offering this book in classrooms that are 18+ years of age. I will be checking teachers for information about their classes and retailers for proof of their store.Â
It should go without saying that I have written a lot of work in my time on this darned planet. So maybe you want some of the previous work? Alright, I'll bite.
Poetry Broadsides (art prints for poetry)
$20 Like Warm Plastic Broadside Set This set of 4 broadsides features foil text over illustration backgrounds of a selection of poems from the book. Thanks to the foil, the poem is fully legible in person even as it crosses details of the art! On the reverse side of each print is the full cover illustration, so you can frame a poem or the cover! Â
$10 I'm Building Down Broadside This large broadside features my poem, I'm Building Down, in gold foil text over my MRI. My favorite poem I've ever done, you can read it in any direction for a different experience across its three stanzas. Give it a try!
$10 Obsessed with Holes Broadside Pair This pair of broadsides features sections of the long poems While Opening the Wound and An Estrangement, a pair of poems about my obsession with holes. They are done over MRIs of my own brain, with green foil text. Â
Books of Poetry
$20 Like Warm Plastic The collection of poems about sex, death, and alcohol that this very project is making real! Get an extra copy.
$15 While Widening the Wound An additional collection unlocked as a stretch goal, this book contains an obsessive, twisting poem about holes over 80+ pages on black pages with green text.
$30 Every Day in Love: Love's Dead, the Complete Collection In this 612 page collection, Seven gathers the three books of the Every Day in Love project into one. Follow the satirical journey as Seven marries horror icons Freddy Krueger and Pinhead. Domesticity meets touching, funny, and self-referential poems in this collection.
$30 This Map is Just a Suggestion In this 524 page collection, Seven gathers selected and edited poems from across their previous 15 years of work (as of 2021) into one massive book, alongside a new 50 page capstone piece. Reclaiming their previous work from books that were under covers with a name that didn't fit, Seven celebrates their history. *Doesn't include work from the Every Day in Love project or Like Warm Plastic.*
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