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Jennifer Robin’s Earthquakes in Candyland Launch Party!
June 22, 2019 @ 7:00 pm - 10:00 pm
FreeDeath Confetti author Jennifer Robin reads from EARTHQUAKES IN CANDYLAND. Get ready for two hours of this unholy string bean reading her book’s travel stories, interviews, confessions, and quotidian crimes.
Earthquakes in Candyland is about a nation both fearful of and titillated by skin—skin color, skin coverings, and the puncturing of skin by bullwhips, needles, bullets that bloom like shrapnel in a gut.
Earthquakes in Candyland is a book of love stories, odes to people who burn so bright that they have scarred Robin’s retinas for life. Street kids in New Orleans, an army wife on a Greyhound bus who claims to be a Victoria’s Secret Model with 40 wigs in her Gucci suitcase, Lonnie the junkie who sees angels everywhere and is still in love with a baseball star whose muscles stretched like starlight in endless night.
Robin hates politics but is obsessed with culture. Her poetic cut-ups make a diagram of Candyland:
Candyland means that in a world where the population has doubled in forty years, you pay to be alone, pay others to go out into that swampland of psyches and B.O. and get their hands dirty for you.
Candyland bombs Japan after their surrender. Candyland is the Indian Appropriations Act of 1781, the Dakota Access Pipeline, Poisoned Flint, the floodplain of Katrina, where the old were left to drown in nursing homes. Candyland is Three Mile Island and the Watusi. Candyland is Black Bloc babies who renounce electric light and Watts on fire and Lawrence Welk and t-shirts that feature iron-on decals of Dom Perignon champagne.
Candyland takes your garden and your womb and gives you Lotto and Shrek action figures. Candyland’s DNA is zeroes and ones, a data-snake, a data crèche. The data slithers as it consoles.
There is a fable in Candyland that money (and all of the good things that come with it) trickles down, but what has been going on for the past fifty years is it trickles up, never to be seen again. Money and property are disappearing, yet they are not invisible. You may pass them, but you cannot touch.
Candyland is wave after wave of orphans, by design, in clickbait nation.
Candyland is going to be burned as an effigy for you.
[see also the Mother Foucault’s Bookshop website]