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It looks worse than i am

by Laurie Blauner

ISBN 9780988924864

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WHAT BOOKS PRESS is proud to publish the book selected from its first 
open reading period. Laurie Blauner’s It Looks Worse Than I Am 
compelled the editors with its deft and fearless language, shifting 
tonalities, and discomforting surrealism. The creature she calls
 “the animal” is delightfully recognizable as are the poems’ dreamers, 
forlorn, and misanthropes, who exist in a condition of otherness that is wrenchingly unappeasable. In lines that are playful and savage, she 
reminds us—“There’s blood everywhere and a throat full of rabbits. Intent 
is what happens to others.”

PRAISE FOR LAURIE BLAUNER’S WORK

A fine poet with a masterly command of language and imagery.
—James Welch, Riding the Earthboy 40, Fool’s Crow, and Winter in the Blood

I am told, in a way I want to be told, things I recognize in my own heart already. I am enthusiastic about these poems.
—Laura Jensen, Bad Boats, Memory, and Shelter

The richness of the images is often strikingly original. There’s an exotic quality I find highly attractive . . . I am impressed by the surprising yet accurate way the poems end. —Madeline de Frees, Imaginary Ancestors and Spectral Waves

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 

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