FRIDAY JUNE 19, 6pm – POETRY
C.A. CONRAD
author of Advanced Elvis Course ($12.95 Soft Skull Press)
CAConrad’s unabating love for the King has put him on a pilgrimage to Memphis on an advances ELVIS course. These bizarre, multi-faceted vignettes, conversations, and poems are an homage bursting with love, oddball white trash, and twisted sincerity. While he eats fried peanut butter banana sandwiches and chats up the locals, Conrad also imagines diverse and surreal scenarios about Elvis as the holy rock trinity: god, legend, and meat-loving southerner with a drug problem. These vignettes blur the distinction between real and fictional experience and become a transcendental portrait of the legendary Elvis: the man who changed music and America forever, perhaps with some illegitimate children along the way. Through sourced as disparate as graffiti, talk-show interviews, phone messages, and poetry, Conrad (whose unfettered energy doesn’t always feel that tied to reality) constructs a semi-mystical collage bursting with joy.
By taking the advanced ELVIS course, you will:
LEARN the not-so-subtle similarities between rock-and-roll and democracy.
HEAR Elvis talk dirty through television.
MEET colorful Graceland locals.
LOVE Elvis even if you’ve never heard a single song.
What do you mean you’ve never heard an Elvis song? No matter, Conrad will show you the way. Sign up for CAConrad’s advanced ELVIS course and learn how you too can bring a little more Elvis into your life.
CAConrad is the son of white trash asphyxiation whose childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of Deviant Propulsion (Soft Skull Press, 2006) and (Soma)tic Midge (FAUX Press, 2008). The Book of Frank (Chax Press) will be published in fall 2008 and a collaboration with poet Frank Sherlock titled The City Real & Imagined: Philadelphia Poems (Factory School Press) will be published in 2009. Conrad invites you to visit him online at CAConrad.blogspot.com
