Blue 4 U by Nicholas Teixeira

$11.95

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BLUE 4 U hits you, I mean me (“U n I r so close on the keyboard, / I can’t help but hit the wrong one when I want U”), like a teen text message from the 1990s, except it’s written by James Joyce, after stewing for several decades in TMS (The Muppet Show). Every letter is precious — this is love squeezed up — brave and banal, generous and desperate like an awkward, idiosyncratic present: “for valentine’s day i got you a 7-eleven gift card. i had to explain to you it was cuz you were born 11/7.”  Gracious, queer, tragic, hilarious: it’s impossible not to be touched by this radically original, radically tender work.

— Václav Paris, author of The Evolutions of Modernist Epic (Oxford University Press)

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The poems in BLUE 4 U are a journey through a shape-shifting house of dream, risk, and longing. No line reads the same way twice, creating a choose-your-own stream-of-consciousness adventure so masterful that you’ll float in the turquoise waters of its past, present, and future long after closing its pages. From wordplay to foreplay, Muppets to memoir, Teixeira’s poetry composes its own exalted music of the great potentials in innocence and desire, drawing together the unexpected and blowing apart the fatal sameness in things. “earth control to birth control,” surrender and be transformed.

— Jennifer Hasegawa, author of La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living(Omnidawn)

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Dense and technicolored — punchy, exacting, and “far away on another dream wave,” BLUE 4 U is a livestream of nostalgia, a puppet burlesque of precarity and longing. These poems touch themes of migration, queer time, and evolving technology through sensitive and experimental invocations. Lovers of Lucas de Lima’s Wet Land will find refuge in Nicholas Teixeira’s collection.

— Emily Marie Passos Duffy, author of Hemorrhaging Want and Water(Perennial Press)

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This book absorbs The Muppet Show, its guest stars, and the longing, love, joys, and despair of a poet who has created a kaleidoscope of shared and private language and experience. Teixeira inhabits metamorphic language, which can live in TV shows, music, passwords, or the lips of a lover. BLUE 4 U carries resonances from its multiple contexts and serves as a means of connection between mediums, times, places, and people. It is daring and tender, playful and intelligent, hypnotic, and heartbreaking.
— Ananda Lima, author of Mother/land (Black Lawrence Press)
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I have watched Teixeira grow as a poet over the course of time somewhere near 20 years. Back when we were young poets in SF together, working diners in the Castro, and by his side when he would distribute his first volume in Dolores Park. Being from two different schools of experimental writing, I have always found the bench mark of his work to be his use of “words as architecture”- his work is free from the tyranny of meaning – but never at the expense of the truth. Challengingly obtuse, but always with a strong back bone of emotional sentiment, hinging on an upward spiral that erects itself as a totem. As difficult as it is celebratory, volume 4 seems in demonic expression of a certain word math punctuated with glimmers of a self autobiography— an astonishing and singular work. To my old literary partner in crime, I tip my hat.
Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends (MCD X Fsg Originals)

Additional information

Weight 4.7 oz