Lit up

Kayden Kross is a poet, Sac State alumna and animal-rights enthusiast. “Doggy is definitely my favorite,” she once said. “I need to have a little doggy every time.” In addition to animal rights, Kross is also enthusiastic about sex, particularly having it in front of cameras. So notable are Kross’s spheres of influence, as it were, that her May 15 Luna’s Café event with wryly funny memoirist and one-time SN&R contributor Beth Lisick likely will be standing-room-only, as it were.

Kross does plenty of sucking, but not as a poet. It’s just that when she writes gorgeous lines like “I used your mouth for balance,” they really resonate. Actually, her poems seem realer than her breasts.

A Kross-Lisick double bill is a great idea. Last month, while Kross was promoting the DVD release of Kayden’s Krossfire, a cowgirl movie she made with several beloved horses and guys hung like them, Lisick busied herself with a panel discussion at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books called “Smile: Is Happiness Overrated?” and “a benefit to bring water to the Samburu people of northern Kenya” with Dave Eggers. Lisick’s new book, Helping Me Help Myself: One Skeptic, Ten Self-Help Gurus, and a Year on the Brink of the Comfort Zone hits the new nonfiction high-concept bullseye: the year of living howeverly. She’s as appealing and qualified a self-help burlesquer as our inherently masturbatory culture can hope for.

What Lisick and Kross really have in common is their willingness to be so brazenly vulnerable and so turned on at a moment’s notice.