New Day Tuesday: C’est la guerre by Danniel Schoonebeek

…You ever get that instinct to call your friend anyway, warn her that you’re here on her stoop at 5:50 AM, but you never do it? Because you want to be those three knocks on her door in the first bruised hours of morning, that fizz of panic in her brain, is it the police or someone here to kill me, or just a man standing in the hallway and holding his bags when she looks through the peephole…

Los Angeles, 2013: one of the stops during Danniel Schoonebeek’s tour for his first book of poems, American Barricade. His second book, C’est la Guerre, documents that trip in stories, photographs, and essays (quoted here from an early excerpt at Guernica). Wayne Koestenbaum said about the book, “Each sentence is hewn, carved, constructed—yet also idiomatically sinuous and surprising at every turn. He truly believes in poetry, not as a cause, or as a source of happiness, but as a navigational system, a method of breathing. The heart that beats in C’est la guerre could save the world.”

Poor Claudia releases C’est la guerre December on 15th. Get a copy from Poor Claudia, Barnes and Noble, or Amazon.