11/7 How to Be an American & Love Songs from Flood City launch party @ ModernFormations

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7TH, 8PM…

Here are some nice things people said about How to Be an American:

The poems in How to Be an American strike the chords of conversations we should be having, should have already had and resolved, or conversations that should be irrelevant. In this generation’s remake of democracy, Malinenko’s book is an incendiary device.
—Jason Baldinger, author of The Lower Forty-Eight

Ally Malinenko is the embodiment of what E.L. Doctorow meant when he said we need writers because we need witnesses to this terrifying century. In How to Be an American, she dissects the American dream and breaks it down to its petri-dish truths. Malinenko’s America is a country that exports ignorance and consumerism, where the greatest embarrassment is to be poor, vulnerable, and in need. In a voice as direct and unstoppable as an ambulance, Malinenko paints a raw, visceral, and essential portrait of a country without pity, without compassion, and makes the need for change feel like the emergency it is.
—Lori Jakiela, author of Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe

Ally Malinenko has an exceptional ability to observe life and write honestly. She is an absolute treasure.
—Moriah LaChapell, editor of The Blue Hour

This is a devastating book that reads as the polar opposite of Walt Whitman—here, the speaker does not see herself of them, these demented Americans. Here, the speaker rises up and says to the Bible and all its believers, to the box stores and all their consumers, to the patriots and all their patriotism, “Absolutely not.” The country inside these pages is lit up like a Walmart commercial and packed with the same ugliness that makes minimum wage unlivable and bargain shoppers unbearable. The loudest voices are all dressed up in stars-and-stripes bikinis, shouting about how great it is to be red-white-and-blue, while the rest of us rape and kill and need a drink to stand the sights. Here are poems that say, “Enough,” that say, “Quit insulting the world.” Watch out, America. Ally Malinenko’s poems are dodgeballs and she’s throwing them at your head.
—Dave Newman, author of The Poem Factory

How to Be an American is a how-to guide without instructions. This book is brave, bold, and honest—a fucking atom bomb to the political and personal poetry scenes.
—Ben John Smith, editor of Horror Sleaze and Trash

It ain’t pretty and it ain’t poesy, at least the way most Americans think of poesy, thank you, Jesus. And it ain’t political, except in the larger sense of human-ness, of flaming outrage, and of deeply longed for compassion. Simply put, this is Ally Malinenko’s incisive deconstruction of many a fetid cranny and nook of the collective American psyche. Pilgrim, save yourself: read it now.
—Don Wentworth, editor of Lilliput Review

Matcho’s Love Songs from Flood City (Low Ghost) is pretty good too, BTW.

Eat, drink, listen to poems, yak w/ the authors, buy the books—one of the last chances you’ll have to do any of this at ModernFormations!