Glass Bikini

Auteur

Kristin Bock holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where she teaches. Her first collection, CLOISTERS (Tupelo Press, 2008), won Tupelo Press's First Book Award and the da Vinci Eye Award. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council fellow, and her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Black Warrior Review, Columbia, Crazyhorse, FENCE, Pleiades, Prairie Schooner, and VERSE. She lives in Western, MA with her husband, artist Geoffrey Kostecki, and together they restore liturgical art.

Texte du rabat

Part creation myth, part prophesy, Kristin Bock's Glass Bikini stitches together the fabrics of our dystopian present, reminding us of our culpability and power in this grand, human experiment. These often darkly humorous poems guide readers into dreamscapes and under-worlds that are ominously contemporary. From a looking-glass planet, we peer back at our own homes and see the news as a horror movie. There is the sickening feeling that something has gone terribly wrong. Monsters prowl here inspired as much by Sarah Kane as Mary Shelley. We hold a tiny prehistoric horse in our paws. We are masochistic voodoo dolls traipsing hand in hand through grisliness and the sublime. If there is any hope in this nightmarish proliferation of cyborgs and militia, it lies within the liberating powers of the feminine. Glass Bikini is both mirror and warning, asking us to see our own strange and terrifying shapes, the monsters we have helped create, and the ones we have become.