Genre Alert! The post-nuclear-family romance has been transmogrified. It is now the meta-uterine picaresque. Here's the back-story:

One day, Gertrude Stein wrote everybody's autobiography. That night, everybody got between the sheets of the manuscript with everybody else. That is how literature used to be disseminated, and that is also how everybody begat everybody's baby. Of course, being a true child of literature, everybody's baby had some issues. Everybody's baby's primary issue was how best to occupy the object world. This resulted in everybody's baby being forwarded to Melanie Klein, who “Look, sister. I want it all.” Klein realized she was out of her depth and fast-forwarded everybody's baby to The Place, which is the neighborhood bar in a fake novel about the life of Arthur Rimbaud. Everybody's baby soaked up the atmo and also soaked up a skin-full of booze, which the linguist on the next bar stool told everybody's baby to pronounce “blooz,” in memory, he said, of Billy the Kid, who was nobody's baby. Anymore. Then a terrible war broke out, so everybody's baby drank everybody's booze until everybody's baby passed out in the dead letter office in San Francisco. When everybody's baby finally woke up, with a terrible hangover and vague memories of the rise and fall of post-modernism, everybody's baby was in a different century, in a different city, in a different part of the object world. Even the terrible war was different, but not so different as everything else. Including everybody's baby, who was no longer everybody's baby, but was Carla Harryman's Baby, and that's as it should be. Because everybody's baby wanted it all, and around here, if you want it all, then you definitely want to be in a Carla Harryman book, especially if you're a true child of literature, because that's where you'll find all your weird relatives and ancestral absolutes, waiting for you to arrive.

Carla Harryman's Baby was published in 2005 by Adventures in Poetry.

 
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