In the Gun Cabinet available for preorder

My long-poem/play-turned-chapbook, In the Gun Cabinet, is available for preorder from The Atlas Review’s TAR Chapbook series, here.

Here’s what editor Natalie Eilbert has to say about it:

In the Gun Cabinet is a multimedia long poem by Mike Lala that blends oppositions with a mastery of language and trouble. The long, eponymous poem is theatrical in its starkness, pantomiming a danger that has ended and replays on loop. Here, memory is an indictment. Violence and whim walk the long path toward and away from place. Place is home or it is militant. One wears the uniform of birth or else the uniform of a soldier or else the uniform of a body, cock out and sentenced to wreckage.

Here, the gun cabinet rises as a monolith to annunciate a series of cruel family events, becalmed of violence as much as it is complicit with a violence. Embedded in this chapbook are screenshots of static, a dismantling of roles, an appetite for destruction, an interrogation of trauma, and a one-act play of self. Lala writes,

I was born, beauty ended
my appetite for destruction
cock out, tongue fluttering
under the pantry as it emptied

On-sale in February. Available for preorder now. Get ‘em while it’s hot and terrifying. (Spoiler alert: It will remain hot and terrifying until we are dust.)

Promo image by Tom Oristaglio.