Thirteen Morisettes
A pamphlet by Courtney Bush & Jack Underwood
ISBN: 978-1-915049-23-0
Publication date: 31/01/24
Published in Glasgow, United Kingdom
60pp.
 
 
Transatlantic streethaunting of Alanis Morisette inspires a brand new poetic form and the results are ALL I REALLY WANT <3 
 
Praise for Thirteen Morisettes 
 
It occurs to me, watching the Golden Globes while writing this blurb, Alanis Morissette has been God before. What else is sacred than emptying form of its sense to be renewed when it is refilled with the ineffable? Like overflowing a pool with bar-b-que sauce or stuffing a room full of celebrity. When they see “Alanis…in the stairwell, held up like a hand” or “Lambs radiate / on a redding plate,” Courtney and Jack are not “playing God” in Thirteen Morissettes, but they are here to remind you of the mess of presence you can inhabit in the wake of divine absence.
– Ted Dodson
 
Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood are here to remind us that poetry is, actually, about having fun with sounds. Both winsome and Lynchian, Thirteen Morissettes moves between misheard lyrics and letters exchanged by two poets being haunted by figments of the eponymous Canadian singer. Together the two discover it’s not a simulation we’re living in; it’s a singalong.
– Jameson Fitzpatrick
 
Like semi-secular mystics, true fans are those who can tune in to the frequencies necessary to notice the constant messages and presences that traverse the air, ready to change our lives right where we stand, probably in line for something soft. Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood are such true fans, receiving and retelling visitations from the many-faced angel, Alanis Morisette. In these letters and mis-transcriptions, lambs radiate, nerds roar, wrens press. Bush and Underwood urgently transmit the refracted lyrics because they know, and we, too, oughta know.
– Laura Henriksen
 
In Thirteen Morissettes, Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood conduct a formal study of friendship and distance, music made of error, Alanis Morissette, drown-out hot-creative death-wish shopping, those wonderful Starbucks egg bites. They study where we are, the world we uneasily inhabit (we who are not Alanis) through a series of deranged lyric poems and profound personal epistolary. I love how these poems generously inaugurate not only a new form of poetry but a new form for being together at a distance, the way Alanis’s mezzo-soprano enlarges the hearts of all those millions who have heard it on headphones, from car speakers.  I love this book.
– Brandon Brown
 
Courtney Bush and Jack Underwood are here to remind you of the mess Alanis left whenever her songs got played. By mess, of course I mean poetry. By mis-transcribing Alanis’ lyrics, Courtney and Jack have made the mondegreen into a poetics, and in doing so they reveal the fluidity and elasticity of the English language. The transcultural, transcontinental Morissette is a new form that feels timeless and boundless. I now imagine Arnaut Daniel singing “think you’re Derrida” amidst swirling larks in Périgord. And like rain on a rainy day, cross-eyed bears, best friends with NFS, a moment to deliver eggs, none of this is ironic, but rather a glimpse of possible worlds through the lush tangles of verse.
– Mia You
 
About the authors
 
Courtney Bush is a poet and filmmaker from the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She lives and works as a nanny in New York. She is the author of the chapbook Isn’t This Nice? (blush_lit, 2019), and the full-length collections Every Book Is About The Same Thing (Newest York Arts Press, 2022) and I Love Information (Milkweed Editions, 2023), a 2022 National Poetry Series selection. Her films, made with collaborators Jake Goicoechea and Will Carington, have been screened at festivals internationally. 
 
Jack Underwood is a poet, writer and critic. He is author of Happiness (Faber 2015) Solo for Mascha Voice (Test Centre, 2018) and A Year in the New Life (Faber 2021). His debut work of non-fiction, NOT EVEN THIS, was published by Corsair in 2021. He has collaborated widely with composers and artists, and his work has been published internationally and in translation. He is co-presenter and curator of the Faber Poetry Podcast and is a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College.