So what you get is Dali (and his wife) and the violence of the little blue dog, barely a ghost in the frame of apocalyptic landscapes. What you get are blonde joke poems, the most mysogynistic and slut-shamey ones reclaimed for narrative. You get slasher films turned on their head where the final girl is the aggressor full of lists and letters to murderers. You get a swirly set of Plath centos that pare down so much the thesis statement of Ariel as I see it--the danger of marriage domesticity and loss of the self as a creator. And then finally, a set of love poems written after the worse election for women this country has every seen and the overflow of toxic masculinity that spawned the #metoo movement the year I was writing them, and that still froths even now. (and a time when I was working out my own relationship issues--how to love men when most men seem to hate women). Plath's line above in the subject line echoes literally and metaphorically through every section.
When it came to the cover, I went with a modified version of one of the pieces that accompanied the /SLASH/ poems--a little bit bdsm, a little bit raw meat, a little bit creepy doll parts (all of which seemed highly appropro given the themes. The BLP graphic designer, Zoe Norvell, did a gorgeous job placing the hot pink text, which on its black bars, gives a "censored" touch to the background image, so there's something very illicit about it, like an antique porn magazine.
You can get your very own copy at Black Lawrence Press...
