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KILLING IT IBD

GAIA RAJAN
BLACK LAWRENCE PRESS, INC.
09 / 2022
9781625570468
Inglés

Sinopsis

Winner of the Spring 2021 Black River Chapbook CompetitionPoet Gaia RajanâÇÖs second short collection is a razor-sharp interrogation of queer Asian American identity, intergenerational trauma, and the detritus of American achievement. Here, lineage is at once redemptive and violent: 'Sometimes / when people say IâÇÖm killing it I remember everything / exemplary I know or ever will traces back to a small girl / on the floor praying please, please, make them see me.'In this steely gut-punch of a collection, RajanâÇÖs speakers donâÇÖt flinch, even when confronted with their own dissolution. They haunt ghost towns and cheer on bank robbers, they wake in the middle of the night with visceral dreams of a centuries-old genocide, trying to remember 'how to coax a howl to eat,' they grasp for myths sturdy enough to hold, emerging empty-handed and furious. Killing It is vibrant, disquieting, a collection that demands to be read with reverence and abandon.----------------------------------------'Gaia RajanâÇÖs KILLING IT deeply considers the ethics of poetic observation: âÇÖI worry that to be a poet is to sit and wait for beautiful things / to die. To exploit distance. To steal / flight.âÇÖ With extraordinary narrative deftness, Rajan guides her reader from phantom water sounds trapped in a knee to the televangelical economy of Ohio with skillful, almost mathematical wordplay and uncanny insight. The speaker multiplies herself in order to gain some omniscient dimensionality, moving from âÇÖIâÇÖ to âÇÖSheâÇÖ to âÇÖYou,âÇÖ all while exploring how modes of address position our vulnerabilities to our families, the outside world, a beloved, a sister, an ancestor, an editor, a stranger. Rajan understands the part she is meant to play and then gleefully destabilizes the crafted role, creating her own rituals. Of the speakerâÇÖs father, she writes: âÇÖUnlike him / I am a good man, every time I kill, I bury it.âÇÖ The poems are not about distance or flight, then, but what is still holy about the proximate and the fallen, what we do with what has already been deemed damned.' -Megan Fernandes, author ofáGood BoysáandáThe Kingdom and After'In her outstanding new chapbook KILLING IT, Gaia Rajan explores queerness and the overwhelm of outside reactions to that queerness. âÇÖI lived / in a narrow house where every night the ceiling / closed on me like a lid.âÇÖ Throughout these surreal and vibrant poems, Rajan questions languageâÇÖs relationship to death and violence, as well as her own relationship to language. In âÇÖInside Every Poem You Can Hear Muffled Screams,âÇÖ Rajan writes, âÇÖI worry that to be a poet / is to sit and wait for beautiful things // to die.âÇÖ Rajan manages to fit an anthologyâÇÖs worth of striking images into this chapbook, and IâÇÖm already aching to reread it.' -Paige Lewis, author ofáSpace Struck

PVP
10,17€