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Sleeping With Houdini
is an outrageous book, a scandalous book, a beautiful book, a book that holds too much trouble and invention to be blurbed. It's the kind of book that might be banned in a society that read more poetry. I'm not being funny. In large part, our lives are propped up by our own inattentiveness. In this collection, Nin Andrews takes a long, delirious look at intimacy and family and the quiet, scrambling, trying-to-stay-afloat self. A lesser magician might easily have drowned in the depths of such material, but not here.
----Tim Seibles
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The Book of Orgasms
There is no other young writer—at least on these shores—whose work even remotely resembles that of Nin Andrews. To find her predecessor one has to look to Europe, to the sly and sometimes erotic zaniness of Luis Bunuel. Nin Andrews’ The Book of Orgasms is hilariously Swiftian and eerily surrealist by turns. Talents as original as hers are rare—and are exceedingly welcome.
----David Wojohn
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Midlife Crisis With Dick and Jane
Nin Andrews is one of my favorite practitioners of the prose poem, and Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane is, of course, wonderfully hilarious. It’s also incisive and terrifying and strangely moving—a little like watching Mr. Rogers put on a puppet production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and doing it brilliantly.
----Dan Chaon
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Why They Grow Wings
Nin Andrews is the most accomplished and affecting poet of the erotic in America. In poems, especially prose poems, of uncanny deftness and muscularity, she establishes, to use the ready word, an intercourse among all elements—including the comical, the rhapsodic, and the tragic. She is matchless.
----Sydney Lea
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Someone Wants to Steal My Name
The Belgian poet Henri Michaux ( 1899-1984) lived most of his life in Paris and is well-known in Europe for his prolific writings and his artwork. Michaux won the Einaudi Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1960 and the Grand Prix National des Lettres in 1965 for his painting and his works of literature, but he refused to accept the latter prize because he didn’t want to be recognized in public. In both art and literature, he was known for his eccentricity and his enigmatic style, and his work has been greatly admired by American poets as diverse as John Ashbery, Russell Edson and Alan Ginsberg.
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Southern Comfort
has all the essential ingredients of a good southern tale: grandmas, biscuits, snakes, stringed instruments, a boy named Jimmy, ghosts, and the Lord. Nin Andrews turns her strange and wickedly accurate imagination on these predictable details and alchemizes them into a poetry of mythic proportions. Here, larger than life men and women, a “delusional” rooster named No Doze, an assortment of insects, and Elvis himself speak the language of metaphor and the gospel. “Sometimes he says/ behind every tale there’s another tale./ That’s the one he wants to tell.” That’s the one, or the several, Nin Andrews tells also in this deeply funny, deeply intelligent, truly southern book.”
----Maggie Anderson
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Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum?
I was amazed when Nin Andrews first wrote to me with this collection of remarkable gems, collected from real students’ notes to a real professor, and formatted as poetry. I urged her to publish the collection so that more people could enjoy them. And enjoy them you will. They could not be more illuminating, or amusing, if one had tried to invent them oneself. There is not a single note that isn’t worth preserving, and I expect I will borrow from this collection frequently! A great little book to glance at when you need a lift when pondering about the state of modern education.
----Lawrence M. Krauss, author of Fear of Physics, The Physics of Star Trek, Quintessence, Atom, and Hiding in the Mirror.