Wake Island

Poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert is the guest. She is the author of The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays. We get into: soul ravaging poetry, Sassy Magazine, the atmospheric charge of 2016, the unreality of our moment, morbid glee, and more!   

The Unreality of Memory collects provocative, searching essays on disaster culture, climate anxiety, and our mounting collective sense of doom. In this new collection, acclaimed poet and essayist Elisa Gabbert explores our obsessions with disasters past and future, from the sinking of the Titanic to Chernobyl, from witch hunts to the plague. These deeply researched, prophetic meditations question how the world will end―if indeed it will―and why we can’t stop fantasizing about it. 

Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by the New Yorker as one of the best books of 2013. She writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues. 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius 

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Niko Vorobyov is a former drug dealer turned author. We talk about what it was like to be incarcerated as a college student, early transformative drug experiences, death squads in the Philippines, meth, the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo, hanging out at El Chapo's hometown in Mexico, Los Narcos Satanicos, Jesús Malverde, drug movies and more! 

In this ground-breaking book, former drug-dealer Niko Vorobyov travels the world attempting to shine a light on the global drug trade. From cocaine farms in South America to the forests of Russia, he speaks to people making the machine work. He meets drug lords, cartel leaders, street dealers and government officials exposing the true scope of the drug industry. Dopeworld is an addictive and intoxicating trip deep into the world of drugs, tracing their emergence and our relationship with them. This is the story of the drug trade as you've never seen before.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Steve Finbow and I chat about his latest book The Mindshaft which is based on the infamous members-only BDSM gay leather bar and sex club called the Mineshaft. 

We get into: William Burroughs, J. G. Ballard, Francis Bacon, transgressive acts/art, noise music, Cruising, Ginsberg, literary pilgrimages, Bruce Chatwin and how illness influences creativity. 

“You have visited the bar on a number of occasions, it fascinates you, you find it disgusting, it excites you, you find it dangerous. You are lonely in this city of millions, yet, how do we connect with other people, particularly if we don’t find speaking easy? Is sex a cure for loneliness, and if it is, what happens to if our body or sexuality is considered deviant or damaged, if we are ill or blessed with beauty?”

The Mindshaft is out now from Amphetamine Sulphate.  

Steve Finbow once worked for Allen Ginsberg. His non-fiction includes Notes From The Sick Room and Grave Desire: A Cultural History of Necrophilia, while his fiction includes Balzac Of The Badlands, Down Among The Dead and Nothing Matters.

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Grant Maierhofer is the author of Works (11:11 Press, 2020),  Peripatet (Inside the Castle, 2019), Postures (Publication Studio, 2015), Grobbing Thistle (2016), and Flamingos (ITNA). His work is available via The Fanzine, Berfrois, 3:AM Magazine, and elsewhere. 

“A dauntingly prolific and daring writer, Grant Maierhofer tears his way through the terra firma of received language to roiling realms that writers rarely reach. Bleach will seep into your brainpan and give it the stinging deep-cleanse you know it needs.” — Gari Lutz 

"Part Beckett, part Unabomber manifesto, part Laurie Weeks, Grant Maierhofer's Flamingos is singularly alive and wild."  — Maggie Nelson, author of The Argonauts and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Karolina Waclawiak’s breakout novel, Life Events, follows Evelyn, who, at thirty-seven, is on the verge of divorce and anxiously dreading the death of everyone she loves. She combats her existential crisis by avoiding her husband and aimlessly driving along the freeways of California looking for an escape―one that eventually comes when she discovers a collective of “exit guides.” Evelyn enrolls in their training course, where she learns to provide companionship and a final exit for terminally ill patients seeking a conscious departure. 

“Every page of this novel is a point of no return; once you’ve read Karolina Waclawiak's Life Events, you will never see life, death, grief, and healing the same way.”―Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives. 

 Karolina Waclawiak is the author of the novels How to Get into the Twin Palms and The Invaders. Formerly an editor at The Believer, she is the executive editor of culture at BuzzFeed News. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hazlitt, and elsewhere.

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Chris Rush is an award-winning artist and designer, whose work is held in numerous museum collections. His memoir, The Light Years, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in April 2019. 

 “As mythic and wild with love, possibility, and danger as the decades it spans, you’ll read The Light Years with your breath held. Brutal, buoyant and wise to the tender terror of growing up, Chris Rush has written a timeless memoir of boyhood in the American wilderness.” ―Emma Cline, author of The Girls 

“Brace yourself: To enter The Light Years you must be willing to be changed. It is, in the end, about the one question we all must ask ourselves―How does one live? In the end the answer is, always, love. You could wait until you are ready to read this radiant book, though how will you know when that moment arrives?” ―Nick Flynn, author of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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A Has Grindr killed psychic gay powers? 

Find out on this episode of Wake Island with Thomas Moore, author of Certain Kind of Light, In Their Arms (Rebel Satori), The Night Is An Empire, Skeleton Costumes, When People Die (Kiddiepunk), Alone (Amphetamine Sulphate)

“Thomas Moore is one of the best writers the world has in stock, and I always expect a ton from what he writes. But, even so, ALONE is beyond the pale - immaculate, febrile, deadly. A complete stunner.” - Dennis Cooper⁣ 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell–broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure–set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: “America Concentrate”) seemed to Russell to embody America’s divided soul. 

KENT RUSSELL’s essays have appeared in The New Republic, Harper’s Magazine, GQ, n+1, The Believer, and Grantland. He is the author of I Am Sorry to Have Raised A Timid Son.  

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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Wayne Koestenbaum is a poet, critic, and artist. 

His books include The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist; Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon; My 1980s and Other Essays; Humiliation; Hotel Theory; The Pink Trance Notebooks; Camp Marmalade; and Figure It Out. He lives in New York City, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. 

His website is waynekoestenbaum.com 

Theme music by Joseph E. Martinez of Junius

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