Ben Fama

Poetry. Ben Fama's DEATHWISH drops us back into the beauty and the fantasies teased out in his first book of poetry, FANTASY, re-braiding them through BDSM scenarios, metaphysical inquiries, and the maximalism of the contemporary. "If your iPhone had any feelings it would write like Ben Fama."�Ariana Reines "Ben Fama's 'I' is a desolate seer; his 'you' is us all; reading DEATHWISH is a role play. These sexy, uncluttered poems are love notes and accusations saturated with a personal/political heartsickness I find weirdly consoling. Fama's vivid, semi-abstract renderings of moments within our terrible moments are gifts."�Johanna Fateman "DEATHWISH finds beauty in scarcity and drained resources�nudes take up all the data, and brunch is a blackout. These poems want to die young, but instead live out the melancholy of endurance. I loved this book."�Chelsea Hodson

Deathwish

If I Close My Eyes tells the story of two strangers who begin an affair after surviving a mass shooting. In this highly original and delicate debut novel, lust and pleasure fuel the romance between a 19-year-old aspiring screenwriter and a 30-year-old struggling actress over the backdrop of our fast-paced, digital world. Set in Los Angeles and New York City, playing out through text message banter, trashy tabloid stories and other appropriated forms, If I Close My Eyes presents the story of two damaged bodies whose lives briefly touch and are forever changed as a result. Humorous and melancholy, simultaneously satirical and deadpan, If I Close My Eyes is for readers of Bruce Wagner, Bret Easton Ellis and even Evelyn Waugh.

If I Close My Eyes

Ron Riekki

Niina Pollari

Josh Gardner

Elizabeth Mikesch

Moonshot No. 3: Secret will be devoting a section to a special theme. James Merrill wrote entire poetry collections based on his seances with the spirit Ephraim. Sylvia Plath references her Taroc (Tarot) pack in the infamous "Daddy," and when she asks the Ouija board about fame in Hughes' Birthdays Letters, it responds with "You will have paid for it with your happiness, / Your husband and your life..." The creative arts have always had a relationship with the mysteries of the world, inspired by those things just outside the range of our senses. For our fall issue, we want to hear secrets, to take a glimpse into the unknowable: childhood's language of fairy tales and fables, the secret movement of the stars, incantations, spirits, the mysteries surrounding death. We seek the uncanny, the hidden, the immeasurable.

Secret

Moonshot No. 3

Aquarius Rising

Adrienne Fama

There are many favorite dishes in the Fama Clan. Rather than hoggishly keeping the recipes in the Fama Family, why not share them with the extended family. Better still, why not have the extended family share its favorite recipes with everybody else.This book serves two purposes; to keep old, well proven recipes alive and afford new taste treats to those in the family who haven't tried all the recipes included.- Uncle Tom, June 2015

The Fama Family Cookbook

Poetry. Ben Fama's FANTASY operates in a world of Internet, glamor, and lonely 21st century adulthood, through various other sorts of intimacies that happen through global production. Fama's language and affect flatten desire while they maintain a tone of struggle and longing. Fantasy works at the question of how to spend time while alive in a humanity close to burnout, where the value of one's own labor is as inconclusive as the profits of intimacy. The need for things butts up against the living nihilism of late capitalism. "How did Fama invent a tone so perfect and icy, so equal to our times?" Wayne Koestenbaum "Sometimes something gets written and it surprises you, though it feels familiar. An early- twenty-first century decadence with its adderalls. Still the colloquials and the coteries of the New York School, but now with selfies, with crying selfies even. And klout scores. And there is fashion week, the Miami, the Los Angeles. Tans. Pools. I read FANTASY again and again, thinking I could learn to recite its spell on my own. It is a book about an end. An end of our economic empire. Of the fantastical expansion of income. And the poems here just keep going. They keep going to work. They plan what to do when one encounters an active shooter situation. Sort of. Because there is no plan really that makes sense except maybe to keep showing up to work stoned." Juliana Spahr "Ben Fama's softly amalgamated new book, FANTASY, quietly elicits states of mind that we do and do not continue to inhabit. Memory traces, evacuations of past ruins pile up under present day linguistic and textual edifices. The socio-political erupts gently at the edges of fanboy/fangirl communiques in which "fundamentalists decried jolie for using her wealth to surmount death and god." In FANTASY, Fama uses his poetic intelligence to override dilemmas of understanding, and agitate all our ADLs (activities of daily living) no small task for these overripe poetic times." Kim Rosenfield "Fama has many faces, and fame comes in many sorts and sizes from the one- week notoriety of the cover story to the splendor of an everlasting name (I may be quoting), i.e., Anais Nin commiserates with Trent Reznor about the fact that Kate Moss's tan lines are, right now, more famous than either one of them. FANTASY is a Zipcar to cruise by such commiseration on the way to a resort Google maps can't locate, but that "if you can't afford it," at least you can "affect it," and there's still "Glamour all night." Bruce Hainley"

Fantasy

Poetry. "Maybe Dennis Cooper and Jeff Clark and Eileen Myles and a few other divinities paved the way for some of Ben Fama's smartly contemporary tone, but the result is all his own: funny, horny, blas,,insouciant, complicated, allusive, and bristling with mixed messages—like a Baudelairean Dionysusincarnated as a reticent anesthesiologist under house arrest for unspeakable, thrilling crimes."—Wayne Koestenbaum "A text whose origins are mysterious as a mood ring, MALL WITCH's strange teenage magic is as much Facebook and tumblr as it is Brooklyn's makeshift clubs and pop-up art galleries. Fama's lyric-meme love poems evoke a present already passing, casting their spell with a winky smiley and 'pearlson a thin wrist. That's as far as [they'll] go.'"—Kate Durbin "The last day anybody had a right to be bored in the 21st century was the day before Beyonce made a Tumblr. Taking a paratactic plunge off of that Niagara Falls of content: past smiling yachts, royal photos of a bread called 'Hovis,' fleeting grasses, one feels profoundly that heaven has become aplace on earth. Even if it is, finally, Beyonce's world and we just happen to live in it, MALL WITCH makes a claim for our own magnificent productions of glorious ephemera. Perhaps they are only glorious as a crystalline booger that uncannily resembles Obama or, like, being in love. But MALL WITCH understands profoundly that glamour means enchantment, and enchantment is a virus. As we learn what consequences our technologies have on our mobile, booger-holding, bodies IRL, we're going to need works like MALL WITCH to be our mirror."—Brandon Brown "Which witch bewitches us in Ben Fama's MALL WITCH? Which twitchy young thing, which moll, might troll this mall? Fama's work suggests a flaneur of the twenty-first century, equally disposed to wander the virtual landscape of hyper-smooth curves that backdrops these pages (designed by Paul Legault and Joseph Kaplan) as the hallways and food court of Westfield Shoppingtown. The book's design and text are inseparable, making a catty chatterbox that wears its influences on its sleeve: Ariana Reines and Kate Durbin become brands alongside Four Loko, IKEA, and Blackberry. Part homage, part inside joke, these poems poke a manicured fingernail in this moment of self-presentation, self-consciouslydating themselves because, in true Narcissistic fashion, they would like to date themselves."—Amaranth Borsuk "The immediacy of a tender escapade as it arrows into your ardent third eye, it's here within the MALL WITCH, a window into the soul you thought you had ahold of. Ah, there's a poet behind this mirror big enough for two. Before I die / I want you to be new. It wasn't just a nice plan, it was a fucking miracle, so eat now and drink!! Don't be stupid by your jaw, come to know this as another real poetry!! Don't even run, just let the MALL WITCH nail you!!"—CAConrad

Ben Fama

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