72 Pages
©2012
Publisher: Magic Helicopter
Purchase includes: PDF

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You wake up with your hopes for sprinklers that don't cost too much. Then you start your walking and thinking of what the first moonwalk cost us. There's the us, yes, whomever in your life you want to take over your long standing nights. You and the day and the us and the thinking all start together, and NO, NOT TODAY starts there over and over. Wise out of the side of the mouth, funny and pillow talking, these are daily delvings "clearly intimate and at home / in the country," impressed and terrified by the consistency of life and love. Reading the poems of Jordan Stempleman is like becoming your own trust fall partner.

"With affectionate and funny familiarity, No, Not Today records the thinking that shapes days from within. Anxieties assert themselves, love insists on appearing, and meanwhile time and how we name it cycle onward. It's like Jordan Stempleman himself decided to each morning / wake up, look out at the world and sign hooray. That cheer is not simple. It responds to darkness as well as light. Regardless, it heartens; reading this book I want to join in."—Heather Christle, author of What is Amazing

"No, Not Today operates through a lovely paradox of dailiness, where, as the title implies, there s always some nagging existential deferral, some little lack finally large enough to make each Tuesday, Friday, Monday feel at once complete as a vessel of feeling, yet one forever seeking that 25th hour. Not then entirely unlike a poem, and so, the days here take on that plasticity demanded by conscripted time that s always turned against us: "All there is left to do / is not call this the one occasion we have to know." These endeared lyrics take the week, the month, the year and distress their order, gently, and with unprecedented care. They take place toward sometime when we're "healed enough to let go of our hard habits / and loaded appearances." One Saturday after another."—Dana Ward, author of This Can't Be Life

Jordan Stempleman was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1977. He co-edits The Continental Review, teaches writing and literature at the Kansas City Art Institute, and curates A Common Sense Reading Series. His books include NO, NOT TODAY (Magic Helicopter Press, 2012) and STRING PARADE (BlazeVOX [books], 2008).