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Married to the Icepick Killer
A Poet in Hollywood

Prizewinning poet and novelist Carol Muske-Dukes offers smart, entertaining stories and reflections about the unpredictable marriage of L.A. and literature.

"Not long after I moved to Los Angeles from New York City, I attended a cocktail party with my actor-husband. At the party, which was full of film and TV industry representatives, a man asked me what I did for a living. I told him that I was a writer. 'Right,' he said. 'Half-hour or hour?' I smiled indulgently. 'Neither,' I said, fixing him with what I like to think of as an Oversoul gaze. 'Lifetime.' He smiled back. 'Oh, you work for cable,' he said."

Carol Muske-Dukes, one of America's most accomplished poets and novelists and critics, has a sharp ear and eye for the wild incompatibilities-—and the surprising commonalities— of Hollywood and a life of letters. In this wonderful collection of real-life adventures and meditations on literature and landscape, she addresses the significance of huge freeway billboards featuring quotations from Emily Dickinson, she observes the warning signs that poetry is in danger of commodification, and, in the title essay, she describes the severe adjustments she had to make as she struggled to understand the life of show business when she married actor David Coleman Dukes (who died last year). Muske Dukes is a witty, socially acute diviner of correspondences and contradictions. Here she takes a geographical (and commercial) context and shows how it fits in with and grates against a poet's sensibility.

Carol Muske-Dukes is the director of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. Her most recent collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She has written three novels, most recently, Life After Death. She lives in Los Angeles.

Advertising
Poets and Writers - November/December issue

National Print Reviews
Los Angeles Time Book Review - Dec 15, 2002
The New Yorker - review - 7/22
Forecast magazine - May issue
The New York Times Book Review - September 22, 2002
Booklist - August 2002
Library Journal - July 2002
Publishers Weekly - June 2002

Events
Connie Martinson Talks Books - taped syndicated TV - 9/3
San Diego Reader - feature - 9/13
Duttons - talk and signing - 9/12
Vroman's - talk and signing - 9/17
Los Angeles Public Library - talk and signing - 9/19
Duttons - talk and signing - 10/10
Skylight Books - talk and signing - 10/27

Local Reviews
Backstage West Magazine - feature
San Diego Reader - feature
The Boston Globe - review - 9/8
The Boston Globe New and Recommended - 9/15/2002
The San Francisco Chronicle - review - 8/18
The San Francisco Chronicle
Recommended - 8/25/02

Pittsburgh Post Gazette - review -8/29
Buffalo News - review - 8/11
Los Angeles Times - review
Illinois Times - 8/7/02
Forecast, New Jersey - May 2002
Home News Tribune - New Jersey - 8/11/02

Reviews of Married to the Icepick Killer

 

MARRIED TO THE ICEPICK KILLER
Carol Muske-Dukes
On-sale date: 8/13
Publication date: 8/20
0-375-50711-6

 
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