Morocco

About the Book:

Here is a book, a low-slung bulb lighting a tall dark room, a book big enough to question and small enough to love. Written in treaty by Matthew Savoca and Kendra Grant Malone, here is a book of time and together and lonely and wanting. Knife-words edges out, lines bursting and splitting the table long, get to know Morocco. It already knows you. These poems are naked and bright, speaking from a tall dark room to all the spaces in between. A love poem, yes. A camera readied, yes. Pictures worth a thousand words ground down to dust, Morocco comes together now.

Published: November 11, 2011 (116 pp., paper)
ISBN: 978-0-9830674-7-4
Trim: 5×8
Goodreads: Add to Your Shelf

Trailer:

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Praise:

– I took two sleeping pills at midnight and opened up Morocco. It’s 3:19. — Giancarlo DiTrapano, editor of New York Tyrant

– It’s easy to be a cynic when it comes to poetry. Like, “It’s all been done before, so why bother?” I guess that I was feeling cynical for days (weeks, months, years, lifetimes) before reading Morocco by Kendra Grant Malone and Matthew Savoca, but after reading their book I felt awash in the new. A new cool stream of poetry where anything is possible. Where words become perception, where we feel with words as if the sounds of language are our hands once more. Isn’t that what we want from poetry? To bloom again. That’s what I want. I know that’s what you want, too. Read this book. — Dorothea Lasky, author of Black Life

– Morocco is a brutally spare document of an amalgam of emotions wrought from bodies wrecked by love finding love again in one another. Somehow Malone & Savoca have together found a way to speak of urine & bruising & webcam erections & complex guilt in the same breath as longing & waiting & commiseration & many other more nameless emotions evoked through a kind of rare space between people that help keep us hungry & alive. The result is moving and surprisingly candid & funny & hurtful by turns, in the end producing something larger & more honest than so many elucidations of waking love contained in language could ever be. — Blake Butler, author of Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia

Listen:

i don’t want us to care about anything

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just a little sad

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humming bird time

the first time i walked into your bedroom
it seemed like a place i wasn’t allowed to be
and even though i really wanted
to sleep with you
i wanted more to be the first person
you loved but didn’t sleep with
and i wanted the next poem you would write
to reflect this

at the park i looked off into the distance
to show you that it was within my power
to think about something other than you
even though i liked your jeans so much
that i somehow wanted you to be
completely naked with them on

i wanted to tell you about how
i like to declare what i want
and then not give it to myself
and i wanted you to believe me
and not ever consider that my declarations
might not be accurate

when we sat on the bench
sharing earphones
and a cigarette
i didn’t want to be anywhere else,
but later i made you lunch to show you
how nice it would be
to go to morocco together
while we ate it i sat and thought about how
i wanted your boyfriend to be there
saying funny things in his french accent
and all of us all laughing all the time

i wanted to be in bed with you two,
or hovering just over it
in the sweetest possible way

and when you put my phone
inside your pants
i wanted desperately for someone to call me
but no one did
so we walked out to the balcony
you pointed across the street
and said “i like that tree”
“it kind of looks like me” i said
you laughed a lot
then tried to tie all your hair
around my wrist at once
but it slipped off

later when i was walking alone
down a dirty street
i wanted to be a bright blue humming bird
hidden in your room,
to be able to buzz for you
while your eyes were shut,
to see you from all the angles
that i didn’t get to see you from
on the couch

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* Request a review copy: Editor[at]Dark Sky Books.

* Read DSM’s interview with Kendra and Matthew.