My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed

The poems in My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed: 46 Sonnets "walk the thin blade of slapstick and flirtation." The speaker keeps calling out in funny and fantastical ways, asking for an impossible sort of intimacy. By equal turns, heartfelt and hilarious, the speaker conjures up poems populated by trees, birds, fog, cigarettes, Tom Petty, bourbon, Vicodin, books, warlocks, fireflies, dumpsters, daiquiris, scars and stones. Although rooted in the sonnet tradition, these poems are inventive and adventurous, offering a compelling, unique poetry.

"These 46 sonnets are really beautiful. There's a spokenness that's disarming and immediate, and the poems are comfortable with everything from Caravaggio to Tom Petty; they are poems about Art and Youth and are filled with intense yearning. Arguments long abandoned are taken up again in a way that's both one sided and strangely intimate. Lacour says he wants his language to be "capable of filling in what's missing" and that's what these poems try to do. Except what's missing is a large part of his heart, and while you know he can't get it back, these are beautiful attempts."

-Matthew Rohrer

"A sonnet is a little song. Just a little one, like three and a half minutes of your heart pressed forever onto slinky magnetic tape that will always rewind you right back to the crucial moment: the brush of fingertips in passing, those disappearing tail lights, that cigarette flicked out into the darkness outside the bar. Which is just everything, actually. These 46 little sonnets are essential: the real deal, 644 lines of indelible, heart-searing moments, stripped of the kind of formal prettiness that obscures what matters, that separates pop from the blues. They're a slim bridge across the chasm that grins between poetry-romance and real, messy love. Each is full of the ache of might-have-been or never-was, undercut by gestures made to seem nonchalant but weighted with longing. This mixtape is a cri de cur, a call to arms, the book that made me-uh-huh-love poetry again."

-Lauren Ireland

"Who yet keenly asserts that Ted Berrigan's Sonnets were sonnets? Bernadette Mayer. When did you last see the heart (la coeur) laid bare? Baudelaire. Yes, but of course, clotted with scuz, sexually sick and twisted. Still, "you expound on the inert cubism of certain commemorative plates" -Justin, may I call you Justin? Juan el Carr refused to excuse your dementia. "I heard these guys suck live." Poe. Posies. Poesy. You take it all too far. You insulate us from the Law." 

-Geoffrey Cruickshank-Hagenbuckle

"The sonnet endures not...