some notes on the new book
Almost two years ago exactly I was listening to T. Swift's Tortured Poets Department on repeat and it occurred to me, one line from "So High School" would be a great title for what was then just an amorphous and incomplete manuscript which included a couple of series that centered around the idea of women as property, a chattel, but also as monsters in their own way. The pretty dead things series was at the heart of it, my poems about 17th century vampire brides, but also the governess poems of terrible and unguessable, which had been finished the year before. I was also in the thick of wedding planning for the next summer, which had me thinking of brides and bargains and contracts just generally. Because I was busy getting ready to release RUINPORN, I scribbled the title down in a notebook and put it away. As the poem series intended for that particular full-length project grew over the past two years, first through the winged poems, another sea-washed series called deepwater, and this winter with the abattoir letters, the book began to take shape and I grew even more resolute on the title choice.
There were of course some changes. One series, another one about a spooky maritime town, did not quite fit and will no doubt turn up elsewhere, possibly just a zine. Other series were eliminated as better fits and will go into the next book, which already has begun to take shape in bits and parts even while most of my new writing efforts have been focused mostly on plays since last fall (and dare I say, I already may have a title and about half the poems.
This one is a chonky one, 120 plus pages, with many sections that are longer in their lines than I usually fare. The abattoir letters are the only prose poems in this one. The cover, I designed late last year and immediately fell in love with. There are many copies available in the shop as we speak.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, there is much about domesticity and monstrosity in these poems. The bloodied brides of Bluebeard. The French girls turned vampires in the tropics and dropped into the rough new world. Sea-side towns that flood and re-emerge. There is blood and gore and strangely boned wings, but also beauty in the macabre. I cannot wait to share it with you.
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