At once sharp and tender, this debut collection from Christine Larusso (winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writers Residency Prize) overflows with all the sorrows and ecstasies, the violations and acts of revenge, of girlhood and women's coming-of-age. Set against the landscape of Southern California, where wide, wild expanses mingle with segregated sprawl, written from the viewpoint of a woman in a multiracial family, There Will Be No More Daughters has one foot planted in the firm realities of patriarchal domination, racial unbelonging, sex, death, and intergenerational alcoholism--and another in vivid flights of dream and dissociation.
Mr. West covers the main events in superstar Kanye West's life while also following the poet on her year spent researching, writing, and pregnant. The book explores how we are drawn to celebrities—to their portrayal in the media—and how we sometimes find great private meaning in another person's public story, even across lines of gender and race. Blake's aesthetics take her work from prose poems to lineated free verse to tightly wound lyrics to improbably successful sestinas. The poems fully engage pop culture as a strange, complicated presence that is revealing of America itself. This is a daring debut collection and a groundbreaking work. An online reader's companion will be available at http://sarahblake.site.wesleyan.edu.
Poetry. Women's Studies. Sara Sutterlin's I WANTED TO BE THE KNIFE picks at the bones of modern romance by exploring the disappointments of intimacy and the loneliness of dissolving relationships. Her poems are brutal, funny and full of tender, ugly details that remind us of the compromises we make with ourselves and each other when in love. Originally published as a small booklet by Metatron in 2015, I WANTED TO BE THE KNIFE by Sara Sutterlin took the poetry world by storm, selling over 500 units in its first 8 months of publication. This brand new, expanded edition features the initial booklet, plus 28 new poems which both complement and challenge the originals.
A fragmented, lyrical essay on memory, identity, mourning, and the mother. Writing is how I attempt to repair myself, stitching back former selves, sentences. When I am brave enough I am never brave enough I unravel the tapestry of my life, my childhood. —from Book of Mutter Composed over thirteen years, Kate Zambreno's Book of Mutter is a tender and disquieting meditation on the ability of writing, photography, and memory to embrace shadows while in the throes—and dead calm—of grief. Book of Mutter is both primal and sculpted, shaped by the author's searching, indexical impulse to inventory family apocrypha in the wake of her mother's death. The text spirals out into a fractured anatomy of melancholy that includes critical reflections on the likes of Roland Barthes, Louise Bourgeois, Henry Darger, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Peter Handke, and others. Zambreno has modeled the book's formless form on Bourgeois's Cells sculptures—at once channeling the volatility of autobiography, pain, and childhood, yet hemmed by a solemn sense of entering ritualistic or sacred space. Neither memoir, essay, nor poetry, Book of Mutter is an uncategorizable text that draws upon a repertoire of genres to write into and against silence. It is a haunted text, an accumulative archive of myth and memory that seeks its own undoing, driven by crossed desires to resurrect and exorcise the past. Zambreno weaves a complex web of associations, relics, and references, elevating the prosaic scrapbook into a strange and intimate postmortem/postmodern theater.
Poetry. Women's Studies. Sublimely cunning, BABY is personal, universal; sparse, vast. Sara Sutterlin's third collection of poetry is an examination of intimacy, a gesture towards redemption, and a demand for victory over the peril of love.
"Hour of the Wolf" is a hypnagogic incantation from writer M Kitchell (Spiritual Instrument, Island, Apart From). Robed figures and furry men, ice caves and deserts, god and serpent, shapelessness and sacred geometry, mysterious artifacts and unfolding perceptions coalesce in a pentacle of overlaid story bodies, each sinking deeper into its own true consciousness, while at the same time constructing an indexical sequence of translation from raw sense to mediated artifice, a primer of the dissolution of life into text. "Hour of the Wolf" combine experience and meaning into a ritual object, a book that is not a place separate from this world, but an impossible place within it.