Got this one for review and promptly lost it in the boxes as I prepared to move. I'm so sorry about the delay in review!

This is a beautifully printed volume of poetry and art that's not afraid to push you in weird ways. The two page spread of "when did crap become the new black?" made me laugh. "Daedalus, afraid to fly" made me sad, imagining lost possibilities for an author I'd never known. As usual for a volume of poetry, not all of it spoke to me, but that's fine. An unusual experience nonetheless.

I received this in summer 2015 as an Early Reviewer. I didn't like it. As other reviewers have said, it lacked context and seemed juvenile: like reading someone's high school journal, poetry-wise. Some of the illustrations were kind of cool, but altogether, very ho-hum. ( )

Like some other ER reviewers out here, I liked, but didn't love, Is She Available? and for a few reasons. Some of the poetry just wasn't my bag (poetry seems to be the most personal genre out there), and I'm not a dude so some of the sexual stuff (there wasn't a ton) didn't do anything for me. What I liked the best was the various artwork throughout, and the way the format changed things up on nearly every page. It reminded me of "House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielweski and "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" by Laurence Sterne. It also refers you to a website (is-she-available.com) with promises of extra artwork, profiles, photographs, poetry, and, most importantly, original music. As of today's date (January 2016) the only thing missing is the music. It's a nice book to flip through, and like most collected stories, not everything will hit the mark. I look forward to hearing the music whenever it appears online, though, and I'm glad that I got the chance to get a copy through the ER program. ( )

I didn't completely love the poetry in this book, but the art really made it for me. It's a bit scattered and .. I guess you could call it esoteric (but that's probably a terrible word for it, I just can't think of a better way to describe it), but it's somehow also totally relate-able when you really take the time to investigate thoroughly the accompanying art. This also makes me a little sad to not get the multi-media experience. When I read the description of this book on the Early Reviewers list, I definitely expected to receive something else in addition to the book that had the multi-media bits on it. I don't know what, a CD/DVD/flash drive maybe? I wouldn't have missed that if I hadn't read that description though. This book is definitely gorgeous and a 'sharing' book. You'll want to have it sitting around, though I hate the term 'coffee table book' I think that's sort of where this fits. It's intriguing enough to pick up and browse through and also holds up for a deeper inspection. ( )

As a traditional clothbound book, this suffers from a lack of context. The title page gives a credit to the music, of which there is none, nor a link to an online source. (On second look, a front endpaper includes the words is-she-available.com, printed sideways. However, the music isn't yet available at that site.) You have to read the copyright page and table of contents carefully to get it: All the text is by the credited author, Igor Goldkind, while the images are provided by several talented artists, as part of a multimedia project that the book is only a part of. The text consists mostly of poems and a few stories. Many of the images are very beautiful, although they lean toward the grotesque and the startling. The poems...well, they read like the poems of someone who hasn't been writing poems for very long. If that's an incorrect impression, it's not the reader's fault.

The main subject matter includes cruelty, courage, and issues of racial heritage, especially Jewishness. But there's one story about the coming of the Khmer Rouge. Goldkind is obviously a man of violent passions and no small self-regard. "This is a book of poetry...a door that opens into your self and lead out of yourself...some of my words and even the music may prove disturbing to the faint of heart. If so, then good!" The poems are mostly free verse and use poetry-slam techniques such as repetition, with noticeable Beat influence ("Hey there, / alien-scum-bastard-Dave from Sirius / You were supposed to meet me for a drink last week.") All the typographic stops are pulled out: giant text mixed with tiny text, text printed in curly wisps, all-caps white on black. The overall impression is not of urgency, but of trying too hard. As one two-page spread puts it, in two-color offset print on a butcher-block background, "TELL me When DID CRAP BECOME THE NEW BLACK?" ( )