by Kaitlyn Spees

“Whip-smart, unputdownable, lyrical, dazzling, pitch-perfect. Taut, tender, a tour de force. A triumph. Unflinching, stunning, mesmerizing, evocative. You will have seen a book—probably many, many books—with some of these words, what one might call blurbiage… on its cover. Often, these quotes will be just that one word. But the process by which those single words are acquired is a fraught one. So much so that last week, one top editor at a major publisher, Sean Manning at Simon & Schuster, made an unusual and attention-grabbing announcement about them. … Under his leadership, authors won’t be ‘required’ to spend ‘an excessive amount of time’ getting blurbs for their books.”
—Slate

(With apologies to Anne Bradstreet)

Thou short, trite offspring of my busy brain
(Throughout the whole damn industry a bane),
I squeeze thee out for friends less wise than true.
Thou gloat’st from glossy covers in full view
Of critics, readers, publishers, who all
Completely fail to fall beneath thy thrall.
Am I not recognizable enough?
Or is the blurbing genre just too tough?
(The book I blurbed? I can’t say that I know—
I skimmed the first two pages. Found them slow.)