masterclass my ass

A term I dislike is "masterclass." Masterclass my ass. The link below came in a marketing email from the Academy of American Poets that hit my inbox and made me laugh. I know some people who do derangement and transgression quite well and they never took a masterclass to get good at it: "Queering the Poetic Line: A Masterclass on Derangement and Transgression with Dawn Lundy Martin."

dubious book promotion

Here’s some notable marketing copy by Wave Books:

"...Kearney presents a sustained consideration of precarious Black subjectivity, cultural production as self-defense, the transhistoric emancipatory logics of the preposition over, Anarcho-Black temporal disruption, and seriocomic meditations on the material and metaphysical nature of shadow."

Makes you want to buy the book, doesn't it?

counter productive

Your hype is not helping your art.

no brand

I hope never to hear of a poet developing his/her brand.

facile appraisal

He was one to judge a book by the author photo.

true or trending

There is a real audience and a manufactured audience. The latter will not stay with the author even over her/his lifetime.

hurray-hurray, step right up...

Blurb writers and other carnival barkers of literature.

blurb lifevest

The bubbly blurbs tried to float the book atop the vast gray main.

books and such

I went into a bookstore but couldn’t recognize any of the merchandise for sale therein.

tip sheets

Blurbs are like tip sheets you pick up when entering a race track. Most of what they say will be proven wrong by the day’s running (or reading).