Spoken Word Poetry Album/Audiobook of "God in Her Ruffled Dress"

My publisher, What Books Press, kindly gave me permission to release an audiobook/spoken word poetry album version of God in Her Ruffled Dress. I chose Findaway Voices by Spotify to distribute it, rolling it out late July to more than 20 global distributors plus Spotify Audiobooks.

Eleven of the 41 poems in the book had been previously released on albums with music. I worked with handpan artist and percussionist Gary Muszynski, drummer Brian Fishler, pianist Ben Flint, and percussionist Brent Sunderland at Pajama Studios, in Oakland, California, to create empathetic, interactive background music for the rest of the poems.

Check out excerpts from each of the book's four sections here along with a list of linked audiobook vendors. Selected vendors are featured below. 

What a joy to reimagine these poems first written for the page as performances, with these simpatico musicians and my fabulous engineer-collaborator, James E. Gardiner!

I'm looking forward to promoting this version of the work more intensively via podcast interviews and other tools. At this writing, I've been busy wrapping up the book tour with readings in Santa Cruz, Calif. and New York City, then diving into sharing it as a Grammy submission in the fairly new category of "spoken word poetry album" (a cumbersome title but one that covers the bases). I can't wait to focus on spreading its reach. 

The response from my fellow Grammy members shocked me: they embraced it! Their reactions gave me faith in the power of pure poetry in this format, an intimate presentation of mainly duos with creative musicians.

Brent Sunderland Recording Percussion for God in Her Ruffled Dress at Pajama Studios, Oakland, Calif.

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“A playful, soulful, feminist imagining of how we experience the sacred” - Broad Street Review, Best of 2023

“A book of deep seeing…also a book of intense listening... a series of divine pleasures” - D.A. Powell

“From its provocative title to the last sentence, this...heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights” - Calyx

“A dazzling lyrical demonstration…from the highs of great jazz performance to the zen of blood testing for diabetes” - Lawrence R. Smith

“Stunning…weaves together body, spirituality, politics, and the world we live in…will stir your mind and bring you into beauty” - Kelli Russell Agodon

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Selected Platforms to Stream or Download God in Her Ruffled Dress

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Spotify

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Google Play

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Libro.fm

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Apple Books

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AudiobooksNow

Insta Attention for "God in Her Ruffled Dress"

I joined Instagram only last December, and I've come to enjoy its tone, more image-centric of course than Facebook or Twitter (as I still call it) and more hectic, at least to me. 

Since my book had just come out, and I was returning to the poetry community after somewhat of a hiatus, I connected with a range of poets. Here are a few poets and poetry-lovers who went out of their way to support God in Her Ruffled Dress.

The Bookish Mama included "God in Her Ruffled Dress" in her Sealey Challenge Readings

The Poems about Diabetes Spoke Most to The Bookish Mama

The Elul Poetry Challenge, more or less the month of September, was created by Tree Smith Benedikt to follow August's intensive poetry readings as part of the Sealey Challenge

She Loved the Poems About Jazz

 

"Provocative Poetry"

This excerpt from "Without Poetry" from Susan L. Leary, author of "Dressing the Bear,"
Made Me See the Poem in a New Way

"Wedding past with future, history with fantasy": Follow-up Blog by Bethany Reid on My New Poetry Book

Prolific poetry blogger Bethany Reid not only generously reviewed God in Her Ruffled Dress recently in Calyx, the journal of literature and art by women, but also posted this follow-up blog. 

Check out Reid's other reviews there too! 

She includes a poem from the book that I haven't foregrounded much: "Emily Dickinson at Work."

EMILY DICKINSON AT WORK

she pulls

the thread

through the linen

on the embroidery frame

and at her writing table

through the white packet

of paper poems

the next morning tapping

the keyboard

piecing together

the html

<br> <br/>

marking and closing

the breaks

a figure in a white dress

silent under

fluorescent lights

at her place at the long table

beside the other programmers

listening to the enclosing

emptiness a white

pillow invisibly

holding the lines of code

on her screen

where she glimpses

her own

reflected smile

“I can make the zigzag stitches

Straight—when I am strong—

Till then—dreaming I am sewing”

the shape of God walking

through it like bird’s feet

tracks in the snow

“I’ll begin to Sew

When the Birds begin to whistle—”

a song hummed

under her breath

a bare small wind

she painstakingly places

the letters and brackets

she for whom

“Success in Circuit lies”

here and now are not

where everything

that ticked has stopped

no part of her shaven

instead tick by tick

her mind the mind

forming the frame

Here's a small quote from the Calyx review:

Excerpt from Calyx review of God in Her Ruffled Dress

"Surprises, Devastates, Delights": "God in Her Ruffled Dress" Reviewed in Calyx, Publisher of Art and Literature by Women

Calyx's newest digital issue includes reviews of books by Rebecca Faulkner, Judith Barrington, Molly Kugel, Debra Magpie Earling, and me!

Cover of recent issue of Calyx, a Journal of Art and Literature by Women

Reviewer Bethany Reid, an excellent poet herself, captures the book with sensitive insights. Some excerpts: 

"Toward the beginning of God in Her Ruffled Dress, the poet is commanded, Write me, write me, write me, and Lisa B writes—lines clenched between her teeth like a bridle’s bit or the pit of a sour cherry. From its provocative title to the last sentence, this...heretical book surprises, devastates, and delights.

God is one central theme of the book, but not so much the One Dad God as the body created in God’s image. Even in the first poem, a prayer, God is the bodies of all the men I’ve loved, but also breasts, and unpronounceable / …carved in stone / particles of sand and granite adhering into a tablet / a forgotten language (“God No. 2”). Bodies are fallible and magical at once. If God is found in human bodies, then also in the bodies in mass graves.

Subsequent poems take up the question of what it means to live in a body. A Jewish body with its genetic storehouse / in the back of her neck (“The Contract”); a body with Type 1 Diabetes with its white hem of cells. The context expands and contracts, keeping us off balance. In “Watching the Sea,” testing one’s blood sugar is like looking into the ocean:

I’m doing what a patch of cells
forgot to do.
A still underpart of a cave in my body
forgot to be part of the sea.
For an instant I am inside that sea.
A face above peers through the water,
its huge eyes green,
alert and round,
the face vague and then clear
through the waves, the stillness, the waves.

Lisa B is also an accomplished jazz and groove musician with seven albums, and she is a trained psychic. No wonder then that we encounter musicians here, with their melodious bodies; no wonder that the poems dive so deeply into one consciousness after another. [such as] In “Trane’s Ride (Naima),” [about] jazz great John Coltrane...

God in Her Ruffled Dress insists that we, too—despite (and because of) our sexy, smoky, moldering, disruptive bodies—are part of the body of God, and that God is not who we think she is."

This journal is particularly important to me because it is among the first literary publications to publish my poems, more than two decades ago. Coincidentally, the issue includes work by Gail Wronsky, a member of the collective What Books Press, the publisher of my new book. 

Cover of the Issue of Calyx including My Poems More Than Two Decades Ago

Contributors to Calyx Vol. 8, No. 3, Years Ago

Yes, the shot includes my unadorned toes... Well, why edit them out in a review about this book dwelling so much on the human body?  

Images from Poetry Reading at Bryant Park Outdoor Reading Room, August 2024

The Bryant Park Reading Room Series Provides Lovely Promo Materials

More Online Promo for the Bryant Park Poetry Reading by Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) and others, 8/24

New Yorkers Love Bryant Park in Summer, Where Reading Materials Can Be Checked Out Free

Poets with New Books: Jenny Factor, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), Tom Sleigh, organizer Jason Schneiderman, and Daisy Fried

Jenny Factor, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), Daisy Fried, and Tom Sleigh at the Bryant Park Outdoor Reading Room Poetry Series, NY NY, 8/24

A Gorgeous Early Eve in Bryant Park, NY NY, for a Poetry Reading

The Famous Fifth Ave. Branch of the NY Public Library with Two Lions in Front, Adjacent to Bryant Park, with Poet-Singer Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)