 Kim Gek Lin Short
The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits
ISBN: 9780982541616
Fiction/Poetry | 5"x7", 72 pp, pbk |May 2010
Cover art by Daniel Rhodes
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The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits is the prose elegy of a boy who wants to be a bug in order to save by symbiosis the dead girl he loves. Can Harlan, in “the basement forever inside him,” conjure Toland back from “the scars of Monday”? Enacted in prose poems and cross-referenced datebooks, the inseparable lovers, Harlan and Toland, eternally rehearse for a real life together, repeating in that instant between being and nonbeing, the loss into which their love escaped.
PRAISE FOR THE BUGGING WATCH & OTHER EXHIBITS
Short’s prose poems have the exactitude of obsessive compulsion, yet the imagery and dimness of an opiate trip sponsored by Lewis Caroll. . . . She frequently stretches the parameters of grammar, rearranging conventional syntax to just off kilter; her written style as surreal as her yarn-and-insect imagery. The result is a terrifying, ungraspable split-level love story: futile, sad and beautiful.
—NEW PAGES
A beguiling and entirely enthralling collection of related prose poems . . . so unusual and provocative in its subtle oddities that I wonder how aware she is of what she’s done. . . . It is what you think when you read a story by George Saunders, or see a film by David Lynch, or flip through a comic by R. Crumb: how did this person know he could do this?
—ART + CULTURE
A strange romance of “the secret motions of things” (Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1627), Kim Gek Lin Short’s The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits is an exciting, mysterious, sometimes macabre new narrative. Her zany futuristic gothic opera of prose poems is threaded with magic, potions, passion, a “concert of hair,” a “hazmat of holes.” With its incantations of quantum teleology, its footnotes & sources, it is a magnificent work. Irresistible!
—NORMA COLE
A luminous and perverse fairy-tale to be read at the beginning of the day, preferably in that “chilly blue hour before 4 a.m.” Complete with footnotes, diagrams and an “unspeakable private crevice,” these prose “exhibits” display a prebiotic potential. What was “not quite alive,” becomes, in this swift, dark telling, “hot anyway,” “enchantment created inside everything,” and sometimes: “a poem about bugs.” Angels, lab technicians from the suburbs of Denver, men in ratty satin capes and artisans of all kinds populate this stunning and strange narrative, which is not a narrative: it is a “growing hole.” Enacting the desire and curiosity the book prompts, a reader might peer in, fall for a long time, then “miraculously return.” I repeat: do not read this book at night. If you do, I can’t—the book can’t—account for your new dreams.
—BHANU KAPIL
This small unsettling book first proposes a stiflingly sweet symbiosis between two shut-in innamorati, and then lets its queer world subdivide in a theater of exfoliating roles. Most shocking in this miniature is the Rosebud at its center, a muse who breaks with her mate only to reinvent him out of bugs, ink and sugarwater. Like a Victorian photo collage mounting, say, the head of Prince Albert on a croquet mallet or umbrella handle, [The Bugging Watch and Other Exhibits] both conceals and reveals its morbidity, its twisted thirsts.
—JOYELLE MCSWEENEY
I kept thinking: Catacomb Valentine. Sometimes we forget that ancient catacombs were mapped, negotiated—which is to say: read—by the placement of the graves of paupers. The tunnel diggers constellated this grammar so they would know how to navigate and create within lush darkness. The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits, in its way, deeply reminds. The network of tunnels—between lives, between being (blink) and not being (blink)—and all papered with valentines, the sort cut from thick, mealy-colored childhood stock. Here is language as enchantment.
—SELAH SATERSTROM
About Kim Gek Lin Short
Kim Gek Lin Short is the author of The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits (Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2010) and China Cowboy (forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2011), as well as two chapbooks, The Residents (dancing girl press) and Run (Rope-a-Dope). She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and daughter.
Work from The Bugging Watch & Other Exhibits was first published in Caketrain Journal, Drunken Boat, 42 Opus, Mad Poet’s Review, No Tell Motel, Shattered Wig Review, SoMa Literary Review, Tarpaulin Sky and Wicked Alice. “The Exhibits” was published as a chapbook entitled The Residents (dancing girl press). Parts of “The Bugging Watch” were published in the anthology narrative (dis)continuities: prose experiments by younger american writers (Recycled Karma Press).
Read an interview with Kim Gek Lin Short at Bookslut
Readings & Events for Kim Gek Lin Short & The Bugging Watch...
(in reverse chronological order)
November 6, 2010, Baltimore, MD
Readings by Debrah Morkun, Kim Gek Lin Short, Jamie Townsend.
Hosted by Michael Ball.
I.E. Reading Series
6pm @ Dionysus Lounge
8 East Preston St.
October 4, 2010, Boulder, CO
Readings by Debrah Morkun and Kim Gek Lin Short, hosted by Tom Peters.
8 PM @ Beat Bookshop
1709 Pearl St. Boulder, CO
October 2, 2010, Denver, CO
Readings by Nicole Beer, Roxanne Carter, Debrah Morkun, Kim Gek Lin Short.
Hosted by Sommer Browning and Julia Cohen.
The Bad Shadow Affair
7:30pm @ Lost Lake Lounge
3602 E. Colfax Ave.
September 30, 2010, San Francisco, CA
Readings by Ryan Eckes, Debrah Morkun, Michelle Puckett, and Kim Gek Lin Short
7:30 PM @ Books & Bookshelves
99 Sanchez St.
August 19, 2010, Washington DC
Cheryl's Gone
Readings by Brian Fitzpatrick, Rion Amilcar Scott, Kim Gek Lin Short. August 19 2010
8:00 PM @ Big Bear Cafe
1700 1st Street, NW
August 8, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
Jubilant Thicket
Readings by Kim Gek Lin Short and C. Kennedy
7:00 PM @ Molly's Bookstore
1010 S. 9th St.
July 31, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
Chapter & Verse Reading Series
Readings by Hugh Behm-Steinberg & Reb Livingston & Kim Gek Lin Short.
Chapterhouse Cafe and Gallery
620 S. 9th St (between South & Bainbridge in Bella Vista)
July 17, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
NPP Presents Tarpaulin Sky & Spork Press
Readings by Ana Bozicevic, Jake Levine, Gordon Massman, Kim Gek Lin Short, and Andrew Zornoza. 6:00 PM @ Fergie's Pub
1214 Sansom (in Center City)
July 16, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
NPP Presents
Philadelphia Poets Readings by Patrick Lucy, Hailey Higdon, Kim Gek Lin Short, and Carlos Soto Roman.
7:00 PM @ Germ Books
2005 Frankford Avenue (Fishtown)
June 25, 2010, Brooklyn, NY
Stain of Poetry
Readings by James Belflower, Claire Hero, Kim Gek Lin Short, Shelly Taylor, Matthew Thorburn, and Wendy Wisner.
7 PM @ Goodbye Blue Monday
1087 Broadway (@ Dodworth St.)
Bushwick, Brooklyn
J M Z trains to Myrtle Ave or J to Kosciusko Street
June 13, 2010, Chicago, IL
Readings by Debrah Morkun & Kim Gek Lin Short
7 PM @ Myopic Books
1564 N. Milwaukee Ave
June 11, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
Poetry at Mostly Books
Readings by Jacob Russell & Benjamin Winkler & Kim Gek Lin Short
9:00 PM @ Mostly Books
529 Bainbridge (between 6th & Passyunk in Bella Vista)
May 14, 2010, Philadelphia, PA
Moles Not Molar
Readings by Jen Currin & Kim Gek Lin Short
7:30 PM @ Wooden Shoe Books
704 South Street (at South and 7th St)
April 23-25, 2010, Manchester, VT
3rd Annual Manchester and the Mountains Poets and Writers Weekend
Featuring readings, panels, and workshops with Elena Georgiou, Gordon Massman, Christian Peet, and Kim Gek Lin Short, among other fab writers. Along with musical guests Red Heart the Ticker Sponsored by Greater Manchester Arts Council
April 9, 2010, Denver, CO
Artifice, Coconut, Switchback, and Tarpaulin Sky
with readings by TSky Press authors Kim Gek Lin Short and Shelly Taylor, as well as Simone Muench, Monica de la Torre, Kathleen Rooney, Gina Myers, Davis Schneiderman, Marisa Crawford, Andrew Farkas, David Welch, Tim Jones-Yelvington, and more.
$3 beer specials and 17 beers on tap.
7:30pm-12:00am @ Delaney's Bar/Celtic Tavern
1801 Blake St.
April 8, 2010, Denver, CO
Kim Gek Lin Short & Shelly Taylor @ AWP 2010
Reading with Dan Boehl, Julia Cohen, Elisa Gabbert, Harp & Altar, Dan Magers, Justin Marks, Chris Salerno, Sam Starkweather, Janaka Stucky, and Chris Tonelli.
6:30pm @ Mercury Cafe (Dance Hall)
2199 California St. |
