It Looks Worse than I Am

It Looks Worse than I Am
Poetry by Laurie Blauner

Available from
What Books Press

and also available at Amazon.com

Click to hear Laurie read selected poems

Praise for It Looks Worse than I Am

What Books Press is proud to publish the poems from its first Open Reading selection. Laurie Blauner’s It Looks Worse than I Am compelled the editors by its deft and fearless language, shifting tonalities, and discomforting surrealism. The creature she calls “the animal” is delightfully recognizable to any reader, as are the poems’ dreamers, forlorn, and misanthropes who exist in a condition of otherness that can’t be appeased. In playful and savage language she reminds us—“There’s blood everywhere and a throat full of rabbits. Intent is what happens to others.”

I get the same feeling reading the poems of It Looks Worse than I Am as I do viewing the work of Cristina Vergano, work that is both academic and surreal. Laurie Blauner’s world seems oddly familiar but also infinitely strange. All the boundaries of space, time, and place are dissolved and transformed as you read. It’s a world of pure imagination not unlike Cocteau’s Orpheus, where statues come to life, the living and the dead juxtapose then become one, and the artist’s experience is defined not by the presence of things but her absence from them.
—Alan Catlin, Misfit Magazine

Sample poem from It Looks Worse than I Am

Room for the Storage of Innocent Bystanders

My house is unnerved. I used to carry it inside with its bread and water and lonely furniture, until I picked a place with a cement hide and iron teeth, having seen too much. I didn't do it. I never did. Neither did anyone else here. I saw someone unlock his body, someone I knew. I fell apart and then I was carried away.

Outside is small and unmentionable: the air twists with regrets like fur. But I have enough here - my mouth opening wider and wider, my tiny arm hairs stirred into action. I told them that I couldn't hurt a fly. Now flies swarm all around me.