mark leidner

@markleidner.bsky.social

new book of poems “Elegy for Pangaea” out 9/15/26. pre-order here: https://fonografeditions.com/catalog/fono-46-elegy-for-pangea-by-mark-leidner

my brother in law is trying to get “boat” going as a competing acronym to “goat” (“best of all time” vs “greatest of all time”). this began when he said the lasagna my wife made for my kid’s bday was objectively boated

slowly, methodically, patiently cold emailed my way into both sandra bullock’s and walton goggins’s inner circles—just to see if I could. and now that I have outsized influence over their decisions, I’m not sure to what end I should apply my new leverage. feeling kind of lost

words I would use to describe the color grading for Digger, starring tom cruise, based on the trailer: sickly pasty wounded light fluorescent beige wan deathbed gray ashen ig filter: hospital cafeteria bathroom can’t wait to go to the cinema

hey man are you ok? I noticed one or more xenomorphs were stalking you and your coworkers in a remote, confined, post-industrial site, and you were the only one who was alarmed by what was happening before it became obvious, but no one wanted to listen to you

we need to set tom cruise loose in a data center. not sure why, we just need to. maybe just to see what happens. we can lure him in by telling him there’s a new mission impossible script in there, then we can shut and lock the doors behind him. then we just observe what happens

what if weyland-yutani was trying to bring xenomorphs to earth to unleash them on our enemies? it’s not such a bad company once you think about it like that. we really need to stop letting power hungry sociopaths like ellen ripley gaslight us

"Backrooms: Bookmoms" sequel to Backrooms. a bunch of busy moms whose main source of social release is their book club get sucked into the Backrooms and must resolve the petty aesthetic/personal quarrels afflicting the club in order to survive. jennifer lawrence comeback vehicle

I think we can handle stiff and/or liquid ai robots as in the terminator franchise, and I think we can handle xenomorphs as they appear in the aliens movies, but if xenomorphs ever harnessed ai, or if ai found a way to mimic the xenomorph phenotype, then we would be screwed

dreamt I had to win at ping pong, but the ball was my eye. the tournament organizers plucked it out of me before the game. worse, I could still see through it—and couldn’t close it—throughout the game. I had to win to keep my other eye. I was losing badly when I awoke

Tomorrow on the program: poet Mark Leidner, author of ELEGY FOR PANGAEA (Fonograf Editions). We talk about poetry, humor, language, mortality, & the strange work of trying to make meaning out of a world that keeps changing beneath us. 🎧 Episode goes live September 8 wherever you get your podcasts.

if I ever became extremely bitter and depressed about being overlooked because i live in a flyover state, I would simply relocate myself and all of the people I love to whichever was the closest coast

if the large hadron collider scientists discovered the entire universe was somehow circumscribed by an actual ass yellow submarine, I don’t even want to think about how people who hate the beatles would react. it would be absolutely devastating for them

stoked to announce my debut autofiction novel, about an unconventionally handsome and charismatic genius, as well as kind and generous community servant, scientist, and artist, trying to figure out why he’s only 99.9% happy instead of an even 100%, is forthcoming from knopf

Spherical Fog would be a good name for a poorly understood environmental threat in a quasi-sci-fi experimental literary novel or novella. It could also be effective as the title, but only if its metaphorical significance is thoroughly explored or remains pointedly unexplained.

my buddy quit reading the odyssey halfway through, then lost his life savings on kalshi– betting penelope would marry one of the suitors before odysseus returned. he thought he was being smart by not betting on a specific suitor–now his wife is leaving him. brutal beat