This spring we've made it our mission (even more than usual) to celebrate new releases in the wake of cancelled launch parties, book festivals, and reading series. With 49th Shelf Launchpad, we're holding virtual launch parties here on our platform complete with witty banter and great insight to give you a taste of the books on offer. You can request these books from your local library, get them as e-books or audio books, order them from your local indie bookseller if they're delivering, buy them direct from the publisher or from online retailers.
Today we're launching Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, by Beatriz Hausner, which Tamara Faith Berger calls ""Elegant, thirsty and visionary poems, echoing with song."
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The Elevator Pitch. Tell us about your book in a sentence.
It’s a trip through the many permutations of love, often explicit, where mostly punk songs are juxtaposed to the moods of Ovid, the troubadour poets and other Classics.
Describe your ideal reader.
Loves Annie Lennox, sophisticated sex, elegant storytelling and time travel (between the present and ancient past).
What authors/books is your work in conversation with?
David Bowie, André Breton, Annie Lennox, Gang of Four, César Moro, bp nichol, Catullus.
What is something interesting you learned about your book/yourself/ your subject during the process of creating and publishing your book?
It was going to be a set of long poems written in elegiac verse, but I ended up making the book more varied in form and structure.
How would you define Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart?
It exemplifies my poetry, where surrealist techniques, such as the associative method, serve as transformative means to achieve freedom in all its forms.
An important part of any book launch is the thank you’s. Go ahead, and acknowledge someone whose support has been integral to this project.
I am grateful to A.F. Moritz for his friendship and editorial guidance, to Luciano Iacobelli for his encouragement and support, to Jay MillAr for introducing me to the Canadian long poem.
What are you reading right now or next?
I just finished Peter Dubé’s wonderful The Headless Man.
About Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart:
Juxtaposing the diction of surrealism with Ovid, Callimachus, and popular music—punk and new wave—the poems in Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart concern themselves with various aspects of Eros.
From wistful romance to explicit sex, these poems are inspired by the troubadour poets of Provence and Italy, and invoke such historical figures as the Byzantine Empress Theodora and her husband, Emperor Justinian, not to mention the Countess of Dia—Beatriz—a major poet of the troubadour tradition; these are Hausner's "alter voices," expressing permutations of presence, absence, conquest, and loss.
Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart reaches back through the millenia to create an unexpected, unconventional, and contemporary exploration of one of humanity's oldest pleasures.