girl show
Kristy Bowen’s poems unfold like a fairy tale pop-up book; open like a cabinet of wonders in which girl is both cabinet and wonder; flame and spark into the night air where we read by that light. In a collection so rich in image— milk and angels and vinegar, the trap door and the hemline, bees and a line of low clouds—I’m struck even more by those seemingly small words of relationship—the prepositions—behind, against, inside, beneath beneath beneath. These poems arise from the “rubied dark” where the Louises and Livvies and Coras live, frightened and yet defiant, and return there, with us in tow.
—Mary Ann Samyn
The poems in Kristy Bowen’s brilliantly musical Girl Show capture the
details of domestic life gone delicately, mysteriously wrong: “My salt
shakers shaped like ducks. My ducks shaped like / killers.” In this map
of bruised doors and broken windows, house after house reveals burnt
staircases and ghostly inhabitants. The girls displayed in these
illuminated rooms “speak softly while night … knocks us out, / knocks us
up.” These gorgeous lyrics document dangerous histories, the marginalia
that matters most. Bowen’s dreamy, eerie poems create a subversively
gothic landscape: “mile after mile of busted / lunchboxes glinting in
the sun.”
—Carol Guess
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other poems online from this collection:
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Separated
into three sections, Bowen’s poems are whimsical with a dash of
darkness, conjuring images of blue tulle, a woman inside a wooden horse,
hearts made of envelopes, and carnival curiosities.
girl show by
Kristy Bowen lifts the tent flap after the barker and the revival
preacher have left. These poems are the ghost tales of small Midwestern
towns, the stories of girls who hid under the porch or behind the
curtain, stories of fires, floods, dreams and fingers that always search
for secret spaces.
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