Aimee Herman
meant to wake up feeling
Aimee Herman - meant to wake up feeling
Aimee Herman's powerful new collection, meant to wake up feeling, addresses the complexities of identity, gender, memory, and body image. This is a book of surprise, humor, intimacy, fallibility, renewal. A treasure map of metamorphosis. Anne Waldman writes, "Visceral, insistent, beyond transgressive…Gratitude to Aimee Herman for getting under our skin, and moving poetry-in-discourse into the feminist present and future where we study and yearn for the salvation of humanity." Herman's work takes you on a personal journey of understanding a body's identity and, in turn, helps us understand who we are. These poems revel in Cummings' forms, Bukowski directness, and Kerouacian playfulness. For a generation set on defining itself, this book is a step in the right direction of realizing the only definition is ourselves. In Herman's own words, "Walk away from formula, resuscitate the dark inside, look for new bulb of light."
praise for meant to wake up feeling
Aimee Herman’s latest volume of poetry, meant to wake up feeling, could be described as poetic counterterrorism. Rather than mounting a series of covert actions, however, these poems intimately resist the terrorism of the powerful (or the righteously normative) against the embodied other. The book lives up to its title and its mission, as both model and process of resistance....The work done in this book is desperately necessary. The next time someone grumbles about the uselessness of poetry, put these poems in their hands."
—Jay Besemer, Rain Taxi
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The grace, honesty, and bravery with which [Herman] addresses issues that many won’t touch with a ten-foot pole will shake you to the core.
—Lily Rex, Blotterature
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Visceral, insistent, beyond transgressive, meant to wake up feeling does just that. It is a palpable writing of the body in Helene Cixious's demanding and powerful sense of the act. Gratitude to Aimee Herman for getting under our skin, and moving poetry-in-discourse into the feminist present and future where we study and yearn for the salvation of humanity.
—Anne Waldman, author of “Gossamurmur” and “The Iovis Trilogy”
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meant to wake up feeling is an extraordinary book and Aimee Herman is a major talent. She mixes and remixes, configures and reconfigures language inventing new language and visual art. She says, "Do not live just because you can." meant to wake up feeling is a series of individuals: an epic poem, a sexy political queer song about the body definition/redefinition relationship, diS-ease and transcendence.
—Pamela Sneed, author of “Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom Than Slavery” and “KONG and Other Works”
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Aimee Herman speaks to her and all generations past and present with these strong transcendent poems and ever-pressing issues. As Herman puts it "i am in-between the sentence structures of my body." A body of work, which I kept embracing as I fell in between these fragmenting lines of poetic thought. Always questioning, Herman asks: "if you steam open the body / will you find what was really there?" and answers "alphabetized psychosis." I say yes and perhaps a bit of uneasy (dis)comfort as well. To misquote Herman: Dear Aimee, every time I turn these pages I believe in you even more. Keep these transmissions coming.
—Steve Dalachinsky, author of the PEN Oakland National Book Award winner “The Final Nite”
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Aimee Herman continues her profound, unflinching explorations of love, violence, and the physical body in poems that are exquisitely crafted, dangerous and thrilling. meant to wake up feeling definitely lives up to its name.
—Jessica Hagedorn, author of “Dogeaters” and “Toxicology”
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bio
Aimee Herman is a Brooklyn-based poet and performance artist looking to disembowel the architecture of gender and what it means to queer the body. Everything Grows, their award-winning novel, was published by Three Rooms Press in 2019. Find Aimee's poems in the anthology Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013), in the full-length collection to go without blinking (BlazeVOX books, 2012), and the chapbook rooted (dancing girl press). Aimee is an adjunct professor at Bronx Community College and sings and plays ukulele in the poetry band Hydrogen Junkbox. Read more at aimeeherman.wordpress.com.
Aimee Herman, meant to wake up feeling
Publication date October 10, 2014
$16.00
ISBN: 978-0-9857317-4-8