For the third time in two years now, we're stocking up on zines and books, renting a fuel efficient car, and venturing out to read our poems in front of strangers. Our goal is yet to be figured out, but we know what we don't want, and that's to just sit around on a couch for the rest of our lives. If we can get $50 for gas and a floor to sleep on, we win. See ya out there! Hopefully we'll split a banana at a truckstop somewhere without a name.
Videos of us reading--
https://youtu.be/Yys8KvESbCI?si=rSeefy7amHAfJq7h
https://youtu.be/gntqNj_szm8?si=sZq94cmyUM_bv7cN
JAMES NORMAN
vagabondpoetry.com
James Norman assumes the open road would recall his name. Musician, part-time lover—a heterodoxical historian of the forgotten, a half-assed Buddhist in his concrete monastery, a traveling freak show feeding LSD to a higher consciousness—Contradictions are the meat on the bones that construct him. James Norman was born to a Navy Man, and the sea never quite left him. His mother was the son of a preacher, though no God has ever claimed him. His mountain is too tall for flags anyway. He has lived in cabins surrounded by forests of marijuana, in that steel onion called ship bobbing across the Atlantic, in squalid houses owned by unscrupulous men chasing the Almighty American Dollar far past the point of no return. He owes everything to the women in his life, starting with Jean. He is a lover of animals (even the human kind.) He hopes you enjoy his musings about Armageddon, though he believes that inevitably we make it out alive to tell the story ourselves. I suppose he believes in the story more than anything else. Most of his poems are instructions for how to survive the desert of self for long enough to understand the thirst that drives us, and he wrote them solely to make it through till morning.
See his books here.
DARYL GUSSIN
Daryl Gussin is a writer and musician who has been awkwardly standing around at punk shows for the last twenty-something years. Thankfully at some point in his late teens he decided to become a little more productive, and has been working on zines, setting up shows, and playing in bands consecutively since then. In 2006, he became integrally involved in Razorcake fanzine where he is currently the managing editor. In 2024, he published three different collections mining the internal, the external, and the messy entanglement of the two. Jessica Mills says his voice, “rises above the dismal din and resonates with urgency, capturing moments of rebellion and reflection.” Ingrid M. Calderón called his work, “A true love story of self…that leaves the reader with a sense of wonder and an itch for more.” His focus revolves around the honest, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant aspects of counterculture and its flavorful inhabitants. The heartbreaks, the implosions, and the defiant victories. Community over commercialism, create and destroy.