About Me
- Paul
- Paul Guest is the author of four volumes of poetry and a memoir. His debut, The Resurrection of the Body and the Ruin of the World, was awarded the 2002 New Issues Poetry Prize. His second collection, Notes for My Body Double, was awarded the 2006 Prairie Schooner Book Prize. His third collection, My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, was published by Ecco Press/HarperCollins in 2008. His fourth collection, Because Everything Is Terrible, was published by Diode Editions. His poems have appeared in Harper's, The Paris Review, Poetry, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. His memoir, One More Theory About Happiness, was published by Ecco in May 2010 and selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship and a 2007 Whiting Writers' Award, Guest lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
9 comments:
Oh, man...
I think I'll save it for when we're next hanging out... some things you don't want to commit to text.
As my ex husband (who just wanted to be on his own for once in his life) and I were getting a divorce, I went to our formerly shared house to pack up some stuff. And, uh, his new girlfriend was already there helping. Pack our stuff. So much for being on one’s own.
There are many such absurd and pathetic stories with this break up. I'll just leave it at that.
Absurd: I go to visit my X at our old house after not having seen him for several months. Our dog has recently died (post break-up) and B has gotten a new puppy. I am excited to meet the new dog and as I pull up, am greeted by exuberant, frenzied dog love. But things go wrong quickly: within 60 seconds, the new pup runs out to the yard, grabs a cat, and promptly, emphatically, kills it. I stand there and watch the poor thing's final moments while B goes and gets a shovel. Within two minutes of seeing each other again, we're on the edge of the woods burying a cat.
Couldn't resist ....
Hi Paul. I'm Mary. This is my virtual handshake.
{{{-*-}}}
Oh man, Mary. Talk about trauma on top of trauma. I think you may win some kind of prize for that.
Glad to meet you, Mary!
I went to visit my girlfriend after spending a semester a continent away from her, and one of the first things she did was break up with me. The second-ish thing was to give me a ride back to my home town, which was nice, with her new boyfriend riding shotgun, which wasn't nice. On the way, we saw a turtle crossing the highway. She pulled over, and I dashed toward it. When I was about twenty feet away, a truck deliberately swerved and smashed it, and I think I made a strangled kind of howl and sprinted after the truck with my middle finger in the air. This is Chad Parmenter, by the way. Thanks; that was cathartic.
You may be in the lad now, Chad. That's just horrific.
This isn't my story, thank goodness, but a friend of mine received a Dear Jane letter from her husband BY FAX.
If this doesn't win the smarmy award, nothing will.
My story doesn’t involve animal death, but hair death. My boyfriend of going on 3 years dumped me for a girl who looked like Winona Ryder. I decided to make myself feel better by straightening my hair. I had heard that if you put perm solution on without rollers, your hair would straighten nicely. But I had dyed it the day before; when I applied the solution, my hair turned green. I tried to dye over it with brown. My hair shriveled and fell out in clumps, and what didn’t fall out turned grayish green.
Matt and I decided to be friends, and he visited a week later while, in a fit of house cleaning, I recycled old magazines. I came across a Sassy magazine and realized that Christa, the new girlfriend, was ON THE COVER. So I chucked the magazine at Matt’s head. Apparently, modesty had kept her from telling anyone that she’d made the cover of the magazine (whereas I would have taken out a billboard).
For more on Christa’s fabulousness, visit http://www.christadonner.com/about/index.html
Ow.
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