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From the nightclubs and laundromats of Chicago, to the standing stones of Great Britain: Dave Awl's What the Sea Means offers a poetic tour of erotic and metaphysical obsessions Conversations about millennial anxiety and terrorism with Cookie Monster. Elegies and odes to Carl Jung, Zeppo Marx, Laughing Sal and the Buddha. Discussions of the animal nature of macaroons, x-rays and isosceles triangles. Night-time rambles through the nightclubs, diners and midnight streets of Chicago and San Francisco, armed only with a pen and a spiral notebook. All of this may sound like unusual fodder for poetry, but it's fertile ground for the eccentric nocturnal imagination of writer-performer Dave Awl, who approaches these subjects with a trademark mixture of humor and poignancy the Chicago Reader has described as “a decidedly wicked, silly, surreal sensibility, fracturing linguistic and social assumptions...his approach lies somewhere between the Marx Brothers, conceptualism, and high art.” Awl's new book What the Sea Means: Poems, Stories & Monologues 1987-2002 is published this month by Hope and Nonthings, the Chicago-based small press dedicated to publishing books by “Chicago playwrights and punk rockers.”
What the Sea Means gathers a decade and a half of writing by “surrealist insomniac mystic” Dave Awl -the founder of the Pansy Kings performance group and a ten-year veteran of The Neo-Futurists' fringe theater smash Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind, whose writing and distinctive voice have been featured on the NPR programs Anthem and This American Life. The book's contents include a chapbook of new poems (the eponymous What the Sea Means); a collection of stories and monologues from The Pansy Kings’ Cotillion, Too Much Light Makes the Baby Go Blind, Talking to Myself and other shows; the 1997 online chapbook Night Diaries; and a selection of early poems going back to the late 80s.
Along the way, What the Sea Means takes us on a tour of erotic, metaphysical and deeply strange obsessions. The stories, poems and monologues in the What the Sea Means cover a wide range of styles, from romantic lyric poems to dryly witty prose meditations, urgent political monologues to bursts of surreal comedy. Whether he's falling in love with a stranger's cologne on a trip to San Francisco, making spiritual pilgrimages to the stone circles of Britain and Ireland, getting crank calls from The Sea after midnight, or profiling the gods, dreams and denizens of the urban landscape, Dave Awl writes from the perspective of ”an outsider looking out - a true believer in the secret lives of corpuscles and cantaloupes” (East Village Inky).
Praise for Dave Awl’s writing:
“Dave Awl has a decidedly wicked, silly, surreal sensibility, fracturing linguistic and social assumptions...his approach lies somewhere between the Marx Brothers, conceptualism, and high art.”
- Chicago Reader
“Dave Awl writes from the perspective of an outsider looking out, a true believer in the secret lives of corpuscles and cantaloupe. The poems in What the Sea Means...will ensure that your mind remains supple and fluent in the possibilities of boulders, celery and unoccupied shower stalls.”
- Ayun Halliday, The East Village Inky
“Masterful...Awl probes with a keen eye and ear and a wicked and illuminating mind.”
- Gay Chicago
“Witty and intelligent.”
- Windy City Times
“...Seemingly insignificant details serve as coded passageways to the heart, time- sensitive and individual as fingerprint IDs.”
- D. Travers Scott, Dialogue
“In a drop-kicking, body-slamming, smell-what-I'm-cooking world, Dave Awl's deft, light touch is a saving grace.”
- Lisa Buscani, Author of Jangle