Image via Fence Books
This book is so good that I’m afraid of writing an essay about it because essays are kind of this fake vehicle for the essayist to sound/feel clever about herself and how she noticed this or that pattern in whatever book and ignored passages x or y that really don’t fit with said pattern and maybe things are supposed to be messy and cryptic and unknowable and that’s the beauty of it all, whatever “it” is. Thus:
1. From “Meatgirl Training Shift #1”
open your mouth wide.
your eater should see fur down your throat.
you have to stay like this as long as he eats.
sometimes after they try to throw the bones in your mouth.
don’t get mad.
they think we like it, like they’re telling us we’re doing good.
2. From “The Biggest Thing is How Everyone is Sad”
some problems that make me sadder:
beauty pageants for little girls
in general teenagers & our parents hate us all (eyeroll)
when elephants die
war movies on tv
being sad
when other people are sad from something i am not sad from
oh, but so then she walked in, this lady full of nurse… but also, slapslap knowing she was so twinkle, twinkle…
3. From “Corpse Flower”
but how meat & rotten egg of him
to tie me two days tantric
4. “Broken Tulip” reminds me of Aase Berg‘s combining nouns into supernouns (e.g., “sweetmeat,” “dirtsugar” and “bloodface”)
5. From “The Bedstand Burlesque”
& how i’d bust out: a birthday cake winged thing, in latin.
but when i peeked, your eyes were froze with flecks of god– they danced
so slutty. so instead i moved a sneaker & all fours sat, thought of
sick dog heads,
the little plastic funnels on their necks. when i woke again
i woke barking.
6. From “Cinderellas”
regular women reinforce cinderella realness…
…they make us go spelunking, do yoga, forgive our fathers. truly, cinderellas are freaks in the streets, sheets. our mothers call them spunky. all that heart! all that wild!
but not too wild. cinderellas reign us like dinner. their sole satisfaction is our rightful cheer. but at least be gentlemen about it. this means gratitude. this means the toilet paper roll. but remember that pumpkin-y midnight? this means leaving & then letting them knock on our batmans.
Ugh there are so many more passages… It felt good to just transcribe the ones above, to feel remotely what it feels like to write something fucking amazing/awful/gorgeous/mesmerizing…
