By the end of Kept Women, Durbin successfully changes the viewing activity of reality-as-entertainment into an active reading of trauma, or post-trauma. Readers become increasingly self-aware as the speaker’s emotional detachment from the scenes feels tensely at odds with the negated inhabitants. The women’s physical bodies are acutely absent from the poems, as if the speaker is treating a fresh crime scene like a museum tour.
Johannes Göransson’s Haute Surveillance (Tarpaulin Sky Press 2013): “A feverish and explicit set of images and ideas revolving around power, fetish, porn, media, violence, translation, punishment, performance, and aesthetics. Taking its title from a Jean Genet play of the same name, it’s kind of like a novelization of a movie about the production of a play based on Abu Ghraib, though with way more starlets and cocaine and semen.”
Its advice works if you’re interested in clawing your way into the lit journal world: ‘Remember, you campers with less personality, it really is a numbers game – if you write enough notes, you’re gonna get a reply. Even telemarketers make a sale now and then.’
Ricochet’s entry into the chapbook scene comes by way of three titles — Bradley Harrison’s Diorama of a People, Burning; Matthew Kirkpatrick’s The Exiles; and Glenn Shaheen’s Unchecked Savagery –each of which exudes its own organic form.
All I know is that I no longer fear extraterrestrials because they consider us a protected species like we protect rare species of animals on Earth, and that’s pretty cool!
We were friends with the shit-filled paper bag.
It felt nice to be at home in semen, comfortable
to get peed on by strange dogs.
But I mostly wanted to touch your penguin, to pry apart
his beak and to pop pictures of you into his throat.
