Ugh, crushing is the WORST. Makes me want to go back to fucking my seriously-involved and highly-unavailable exes.

 

THE WORST.

Do Not Desire Me, Imagine Me

As Corpse                         Loosened, bare, profusely female,
the pulse in my thigh
unthreaded—

As Hair                              Clear of furies, of flowers,
the shade of dry paste

As Skull                             Fissured:
an unlit chandelier

As Dirt                               The ants sift through
and soften

And with no fingertips, imagine

As Dust                              You can hang the air on me

Mary Szybist

Remember this?

I am making memories so fast here.

I can’t wait to tell my children that grad school was one never-ending dance party

The Body is the Inscribed Surface of Events!
A Volume in Perpetual Disintegration!
The Body is Always Under Seige!

Lara Glenum

Scatology

Although these [gurlesque] books all inhabit different stylistic approaches, they seem to share a sense of revolting, bodily-based horror associated with femaleness and a desire to birth this horror or abort it or deconstruct, reconstruct, or vivisect it.… I’m also interested in poetic/art content in which the female body is some kind of representational battleground.

Juliet Cook’s review of Maximum Gaga (the rest of it here)

Pornography

I flip the channel.

Pink O-ring. Pink baton.

The medical landscapes straggle through me,

toting their abstractions.

White jets. Jellies and occlusions.

(In the far corner of the screen, on a wall crucifix, Jesus suffers

the ecstasy of the plastic.) Then — static, static.

In the cracked shell of a TV

lies a pile

of dusty limbs

and a single lotus.

The lotus says: No exit.

No exit from these heiroglyphs

on the pavement of non-meaning.

No exit from a life circumscribed

by flame.

(I say: Like Hell.

I place white-out here, over the meaty celluloid that it may congest with sick stars

I scratch out these skewed limbs

hanging on the tree of sight.

I cut out chrome skies, pink anemonies, chalk cliffs

and glue them onto the patient screen.

We are not bodies, we are nimbuses of static

seeking our starry capes of flesh.

And I, without you,

a moth

pinned alive.)

 

Lara Glenum

Interview with Lara Glenum

How do you feel about the critical response to The Hounds of No, and has it had any effect on your writing?

I’ve been totally stunned by all the positive press. I’m still convinced I’ll be eviscerated. I’ve always wondered why people go to Quentin Tarantino and Lars von Trier movies in droves, devour everything Radiohead puts out, and then go home and read lame Wallace Stevens knock-offs. It makes no aesthetic sense (not to mention political sense). So I’m glad to find that people also like poetry books that act like a crash site… I also thought people might think that I level all this grotesque, over-the-top material at them just for shock value and miss the ethical and political stakes in my work. That hasn’t been the case, though. I’ve been amazed at how well people have articulated what’s at stake in my work.

Do you believe that poetry can create change in the world?

More than anything, I believe in poetry’s ability to change us by disrupting our habits of language and image-making. I believe in poetry that takes tremendous risks, poetry in which the stakes are extremely high, poetry that connects with the perpetual state of emergency we find ourselves in. And it’s not just the current political climate I’m referring to. Being embodied in flesh that decomposes and that is inscribed with all manner of cultural values not of your choosing is also a state of emergency.

The rest here.