Chelsey Minnis - A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, continuing the charge against the sacred in contemporary poetry. Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular, and the outrageous

Chelsey Minnis, Poemland, Wave Books, 2009.


This is when you think you are earning a freedom from
self-disgust through busy-work...

The poem lies on the floor until you step on it and it
sticks to your shoe...

It is flimsy and soft like lemon mousse...

Poems both punishing and radiant—no one is writing like Chelsey Minnis. A fearless and uproarious litany of contentions and revelations on poetry and the poetic mind, Poemland alternates brilliantly between the deadpan, the spectacular and the outrageous - www.wavepoetry.com/
Some people know how to write but they have no/ taste, Minnis states toward the end of her fourth poetry collection, a book-length sequence tackling the sticky subject of poetry: the act of writing it and the meaning of being a poet. In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis (Bad Bad ) approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked and often funny. In a poem, writes Minnis, You have to make a charitable sentiment... // But I like it without any of that fluff... // I like it to be very obscenely old-fashioned like an old/ fashioned stripper. Addressing her readers directly, Minnis mixes the postmodern with the nearly archaic: her exclamatory lines contain an almost troubadourlike quality in their exuberance for announcing their thoughts: I like to live a hard life but I know I shouldn't do it... // I should live an easy life or I am a fool! Minnis isn't for everyone, likely too edgy for the more traditional reader and too personal for a more progressive crowd. However, most find this a careful and entertaining read that manages to be exhaustive, yet never exhausting. - Publishers Weekly 

Minnis, confronting poetry, hurls a fruit salad. The pages of the eleven sections of this book have only a few lines each, most ending in ellipses. The images (“getting hit with a folding chair / And being held by your braids…”) accumulate and converse (“I’ll chop your head off! / And I’ll carry it around by the hair…”), commenting on various vague situations and on poetry (“It’s like trying to drink a bottle of champagne in a roadside bathroom…”) You might imagine that it’s boring to hear poets yammer about writing poems and being poets (“If you open your mouth to start to complain I will fill it with whipped cream…”). Not so. Via references to fashion and offbeat interpersonal statements, the lines of Poemland connect the concerns of our poetry subculture (poverty, recognition, originality, connection to the past, authenticity) to culture more broadly. The book is fun to read from line to line, too (“With this book I have made a very expensive joke…”) and is beautifully and aptly designed. - Nick Montfort

Chelsey Minnis is something of a poet’s poet, and to certain readers her third book, Poemland, will come off as undisciplined, even ridiculous. But to readers who want to be in on the joke, that is exactly the point. And it is, the book itself professes, “a very expensive joke,” but it is also “a fistfight in the rain under a held umbrella” … “a chance to tell the truth” … “crap coming toward you on a conveyor belt” … “a regretted regret” and “double everything!” Poemland is a book-length definition of what poetry is and what it does, a description through over-the-top metaphor (“This is meat colored candy”) of what being a poet is like. So those who hate poems about poems need not apply: “This is a long boring attack,” she writes. But for a reader like me, who dislikes description and similes in their usual context, this book is anything but boring.
Minnis’ trademark is the forbidden punctuation of ellipses and exclamation points:

You must have some sort of agenda to promote in poetry!

Such as self-sympathy or vengeance…

You must seduce and counter-seduce…

And glow with extreme sensual grievance…

Like an undeserved sunset…

This is part of the poet’s self-announcing form of subversion. Her poems are subversive, but they’re delivered in the voice of a naughty little girl who defies “god’s wish” by passing out on the “sticky floor” at “catholic school.” (This girly yet grotesque aesthetic helped spur Arielle Greenberg to coin the term “Gurlesque” in 2002.) It’s the voice of a girl who indulges in funeral daydreams: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you! […] Do not die or everyone will continue to care only about themselves and not you!” This adolescent logic is later echoed in a snide dig at every grownup writer’s fantasy of living on after death through writing: “Death will come to end swinishness… // But my swinishness will continue in my poems…!” This is what Minnis excels at—teetering in perfect balance between the childishly vapid and the ultimately truthful. To write poetry, Poemland claims, is “to enchant someone meaninglessly.” And the book enchants with a long attack of self-contradicting truisms and glittering images of a bad girlhood. - Elisa Gabbert

Chelsey Minnis has a nice trick of seeming simultaneously ironic and sincere, of expressing emotion while parodying it. She’s not interested in narrative event, though the sets of sentences that make up Poemland, her third full-length book, imply stories behind them. This appealingly reckless, mannered, girl-in-girl-drag performance is made up of hairdos, lipsticks, cigarettes, jewelry, candy, private parts, money, and copious drinking. I’d say Minnis is a bad girl, or grrrl, or gurl, but who isn’t these days?

On each page of Poemland are no more than six sentences, most ending in ellipses, divided by white spaces. Every eight to eleven pages, there’s a double-sided black page decorated by a bar code, which sometimes feels like a deep pause—or commodified blackout—but mostly acts as a reader-friendly graphic design decision in a title-free book of poems.
Fortunately, Poemland always seems to be talking about sex, even as it purports to be about the mind at work on poetry. The dominant mode is declarative: “This is when I talk and talk boringly into the tape recorder but point to my vagina.” Part of her act is obsessive self-absorption, though she takes pains to show ego as construct and strategy rather than a clear window pane through which something essential is revealed. She doesn’t take herself too seriously, even when dealing with the big subjects: “If you die everyone tells a sad story about you!” She seizes on comic words, uses them to dark purpose: “The swinishness of others is legendary . . . // . . . // Death will come to end swinishness. . . . // But my swinishness will continue in my poems!” There are remarkable similes: “It’s like trying to drink a bottle of champagne in a roadside bathroom . . . // While holding on to a handle attached to the wall . . .” And there are fragments of story: “A woman is cry-hustling a man & it is very fun.” Great invention, “cry-hustling.” That sentence seems less personal than her admission that “With this book I have made a very expensive joke . . .” This isn’t strictly true—Minnis’s willingness to push way too far belies the work’s status as joke. But the book jacket cover displays its title as a bar code, to remind you poems are for sale.
Poemland isn’t repetitive, exactly, but doesn’t get anywhere much, and hasn’t much of an arc. The experience of these poems would probably be similar read in any order. Those are choices, not failures. The overall effect is of a mind circling sportively in a small space. But this apparent aimlessness inside of a repetitive format has its built-in hazards (as do most sonnet sequences). Best bits make lesser bits seem unessential. By the end, attitude trumps content. Reading thirty pages of Poemland may be as satisfactory as reading the whole thing. Minnis’s underlying argument might be that life (writing, desiring, self-obliterating) is erratic, repetitive, and arcless. Making too much of too little is authentic. Poemland is written against the showboating profundity of other kinds of poetry, even as it embraces poetry like a toxic lover. - Daisy Fried
http://corduroybooks.wordpress.com/2009/03/31/almost-unsettlingly-good/

http://jacket2.org/reviews/art-trash

http://unronic.blogspot.com/2010/04/unabated-stipped-down-and-real-poemland.html

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2009/05/literature-loves-its-bad-boys-and-girls.html

Chelsey Minnis, Bad Bad, Fence Books, 2009.

Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of Minnis's second collection. Sixty-eight prose “Prefaces” open the book, chastising career-minded poets (“You should not think of getting a job with your poetry.../ .../ Poetry careers are a bad business”) while spelling out her own manifesto: “I want to write a poem because I don't feel very boring!” In the middle are nine extended examples of the kind of lyric that filled Minnis's debut, Zirconia , in which dots, periods or ellipses sprawl across the page, interrupted by lyric outbursts: “if you will promise....... to be a young girl.../ ......... I will give you a moustache.” Many, most even, may find these dots distracting or annoying, though it's interesting to ponder their meaning. The book closes with alternately compelling and silly prose and verse pieces, including an anti-résumé: “1996/ No car.// Apply for no teaching jobs. Don't publish book.” Petulant, clever, sometimes funny, sometimes irritatingly flippant, Minnis's poems will inspire questions as to whether this work qualifies as poetry at all, though some readers—fans of, say, Bill Knott, at his silliest—may find much to like. - Publishers Weekly

In the center of Chelsey Minnis’s second book of poems, Bad Bad, you will find a hand-drawn image of a two-headed Bambi. Bad Bad echoes its double-headed doe, and the book is of (at least) two minds. Like Liberace, it’s so bad, it’s good, and it works its reverse psychology on the reader almost immediately. Underneath its Metallica typeface and juvenile hearts, Bad Bad chronicles a love-hate relationship with American poetry and the academic universe in which it too often resides. It is the coexistence of seemingly incongruous emotions (“I have a great desire to enjoy my own disgust . . .”) that compels the speaker to keep reading and writing poetry. Reverently irreverent, Minnis mocks the institutionalization of poetry even as she borrows its forms. From the sixty-eight prefaces that begin the book to the “Anti-Vitae” in which years are marked by rejected grant applications, unpublished poems, and critiques of her work by future poet laureates, Minnis uses the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house. Moreover, she throws a new wrench into the toolbox. After the prefaces, which are made up of statements split both mid-line and end-line by a traditional use of ellipsies, Minnis returns to the extended ellipses that punctuate her first book, Zirconia. Hesitation, resolution, omission, inclusion, decoration, and punctuation, the ellipses are, on the one hand, the bullet-holes that remain after Minnis’s speaker takes shots at the reader. On the other, they are evidence of the unsteadiness of the speaker’s own hand: “I have a new plan for you man-thing . . . / I have a new half-hate for you . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . / I have a whim for you . . . . . . . . . / and it is a love too . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .” These lines embody the vulnerability that so often lurks behind the book’s defiance. Minnis’s fuck-you flippancy is tempered with moments of tender disclosure (“I want to cut the arms and legs off a mannequin because that is what it is like to have a look at a poem I have written”) without which we might think the speaker had managed to escape unharmed. - Sasha Steensen

And here, a young poet slowly approaches herself. It’s a wonderful thing to so clearly be able to mark progress – to see those effusions that push past the promising to become truly memorable. A rocky read isn’t necessarily a bad thing; it has its own distinct share of thrills and pleasures. I found Chelsey Minnis’ first book, ‘Zirconia,’ to be something of a mixed bag. Minnis developed an ingenious form for her first book; the poems of ‘Zirconia’ were predominantly composed of short phrases separated, or more aptly, connected, to each other via long stretches of ellipses. This format allowed a brittle austerity to the lines, while expanding the poems outward, until the pieces approach, while never quite arriving at the prose poem form. It’s a lovely device, but I felt Minnis often sabotaged herself through lurid imagery. Minnis’ over-heated syntax often took the reins of the poem at hand and served itself, rather than the poem’s elemental needs- to the piece’s unfortunate detriment. One would hope, then, for a refinement of this technique in the poet’s future work.
‘Bad Bad’ arrived in 2007 as a proper follow-up to the previous book, and is, like ‘Zirconia,’ published by Fence Books. The two books are very much of a piece, though where ‘Zirconia’ at times felt anchored to the afore-mentioned poetic form, ‘Bad Bad’ is much more expansive. “Preface,” the book’s longest piece at 28 pages, utilizes a more economical trio of ellipses at the end of most phrases. This causes the piece’s declamatory and straightforward statements to trail off, to linger, and even to bleed into each other as a bold attack on dogmatic encryption. Elsewhere, ellipses cover the page in a fashion reminiscent of ‘Zirconia,’ but Minnis lets herself be much more playful here – ellipses break off before reaching the end of the page, occasionally they lapse before resuming their even trail. This allows poems to sway with a limber humor that befits lines such as “…this is bad fluffy thoughts…” and “…I must try not to feel a fake kindness…” The poems are personal, but inquisitively so, and always with a refreshing humor to them.

Both of the above lines come from ‘Double Black Tulip,’ the first poem following Minnis’ lengthy preface, as well as the first written in a furtherance of the mode established in ‘Zirconia.’ The poem plays with certain accepted mainstream stereotypes of poets, especially female poets. Minnis writes “I have emotions and I also have death wishes…,” as if the one leads to the other in a personal poet, that is, in a female poet. Minnis continues, “I like most things because I know I am going to die… my love is like weak… black-legged lambs… I have never had the right to say things that are true and no one does… death is the actual worst hope… I write this poem like a girl in a black wig…” What Minnis is playing with is a popular conception of the death-obsessed female poet, the self-destructive Anne Sextons and Sylvia Plaths who remain the exemplar of ‘women’s writing’ within so many college courses in 20th century American Poetry. Minnis declaims, “…this is the total conciliation of my self with my destined self… or else a great phoniness… that is sung with a ukulele… I feel like I have been posing as a human being... with my eyelids open… and my head at a doll-tilt… it is very sad to have to get up and walk home… the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist…” Ah! Minnis furthers a contemporary poetry of the personal by here dismantling the idea of self-actualization and dramatization – or, perhaps Minnis is configuring a new means of self-dramatization? One drawing on a more diverse pool than the claustrophobic “confessional” poetics of a Lowell or Olds and instead looking to poets such as Minnis’ self-described mentor, Ed Dorn? Is this something like the Hybrid, or Third-way poetics poet Cole Swenson talks about?
I was initially drawn to Chesley Minnis due to the dedication of her first book, which was to Ed Dorn, a poet I greatly admire. In ‘Bad Bad,’ Minnis does more than simply commemorate her mentors. These poems, particularly the introductory ‘Preface’ and the almost equally incisive title piece, have incorporated the irreverence and casually epic scope of Ed Dorn. The best poems in ‘Bad Bad’ continue a poetic tradition of the borderland – an in-between place outside of either the confines of a so-called School of Quietude ethos, or any well-defined progressive camp. Minnis writes that “I am not writing poetry to uphold a tradition…,” and while that may not be her intention, Minnis is continuing a bold tradition. And it’s something she should be proud of.
Throughout the preface, Minnis attacks many of the stalwart characteristics of the contemporary poetry community. But then, Minnis’ militantly isolationist stance must be ultimately seen as just that - a stance. That is, she is making a point, and it is indeed refreshing for a poet to attack the hoary norms of a stifled and shocking careerist poetic community. If ‘Double Black Tulip’ dismantles a conventional conception of the anguished poet awash in their own self-mythologizing, then the ‘Preface’ takes aim at the careerist community that has arisen in the last sixty-plus years around the workshop. Minnis’ antagonistic stance is clear in statements such as “If anyone thinks they need to write reviews, teach classes, edit magazines, or translate books in order to write good poetry… then maybe they should just take a rest from it…” This is followed by, “You should not think of getting a job with your poetry…/ If you do, then you will begin to count your own books…/ Poetry careers are a bad business…” She writes in ‘Preface 36’ that “Poetry writing” is a hardship.” Note the quotes around ‘poetry writing;’ what is being written about is not the simple act of writing, but its standardization in the workshop environment.
Later, she confesses, “Sometimes I am bored by poetry and I am supposed to think it is my own fault…/ But how can it be my fault when I am so trusting-hearted?/ As a young poet I was well entertained by discouraging remarks…/ Now I have to bark like a dog to forget that memory!” And yes, Minnis does bark, that is, she makes many reactionary swipes at the workshop system, but it’s an infrastructure far too complex and multifaceted to simply dismiss out of hand. Still, it’s a treat to read lines like “People will give me a compliment when they don’t know if I’m any good or not…,” which to me sounds like a dig directed at careerist back-cover superlatives. It should be noted, then, the ambivalence of her back quotes, such as “…many won’t find her…acceptable at all…” from Cole Swenson, or Robert Strong’s admission that “…her poems take some getting used to…” How much of Minnis’ cheek is critique and how much is simple insolence is a valid question.
This does set up the book as something of a challenge, as an affront to ‘good’ taste. Take the title for instance. What we have here is not the vapid “good bad” of popular culture and kitsch, of a ‘safe’ irony, but an actual “bad bad.” Like the Flarf poets, Minnis intentionally courts poor taste, and the included illustration of a two-headed deer does have something of a spiritual kinship to Gary Sullivan’s rainbow-shitting Pegasus-cum-unicorn. But it would be a misplaced assertion to align Minnis’ brand of defiance with the conceptual pranks of the Flarfists, a group of poets who possess a much clearer through-line to the Pound-Zukofsky-Stein tradition and postmodernist poetics. Minnis positions her own poetry quite accurately when she writes, “Intellectual, anachronistic, superserious: I’m not going to start crying because “experimental” and I’m not going to start crying because “not experimental” …I just want to piss down my own leg…” Aside from Minnis’ wonderful collapsible grammar in this selection, the above excerpt is notable because she clearly puts herself in the borderland I mentioned before. One of Minnis’ clear strengths is that she fails to respect our conventional idea of a binary poetic tradition.
If only the rest of “Bad Bad” was as cheeky, clever and clear-voiced as “Preface!” The defiance of lines such as “It is very outdated to be so drunk, but my poems will not be outdated…” is infectious. Unfortunately, “Bad Bad” loses steam as Minnis retreats into a lurid kitsch of “…chartreuse ostrich boots” and “marmot fur.” The remainder of the ellipses poems traffic in a similar gaudiness. Take “P-Irate,” which begins with “…the roaring… blouse of the moment… is chiffon… with ruffles… and is a smocked chiffon… that you wear as the… swans walk around you… in a circle… and is simply a stylish pellucid object… which may be held in one hand out an open window… or look good draped over your frail lungs…” The problem is that Minnis’ pose becomes progressively snarky and condescending as the book continues.
A poem like ‘Mildred’ with its emerald-tinged imagery and lavish costumes comes across as decorative and slight. Despite Minnis’ desire to avoid dogma, she excels at ars poetica. Lines from the earlier ‘Preface’ like “Don’t mystify me with poems…” and “If you are a poet then it should be foremost on your mind to say something and not conceal it…” excite to a far greater extent than ‘Man-Thing’s’ “…you are permissive… and I… like it… like nasturtium… I like it like cavil… I come back to you…” or lines in ‘Bad Bad’ such as “…it is tight… to be with you… it is crucifix… it is a butterfly pavilion to submit to you… and a… a star of hate in each eye… and that’s why you have to be spanked…” Perhaps I prefer Minnis when she utilizes an unadorned style to support what she wishes to say than the more lavish poems which seem to favor execution and incremental imagery.
Chelsey Minnis has a fairly new book out, ‘Poemland,’ from Wave Books. I am curious to see how she has further developed. If the creative leap between ‘Bad Bad’ and ‘Poemland’ is anything like the one between ‘Zirconia’ and ‘Bad Bad,’ then it promises to be quite an exciting collection. I may have my qualms with Minnis – she is a poet with glaring flaws, but she is also an incredibly intriguing poet, and an invigorating one.
-  Allen Mozek

Mildred

Revenger

six short poems



chelsey minnis poem & interview

Clown


Chelsey Minnis, Zirconia, Fence Books, 2001.

Winner of the 2001 Alberta Prize, Chelsey Minnis' book represents a progressive yet individualized position in the galaxy of truly contemporary poetry. With formal invention and a wild personae, ZIRCONIA compels one to follow gem-strewn trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolically fruitful conclusions.

So many dots! The numerous ellipses-infused poems in Zirconia read like scenes flashing up on the screen during a big, dramatic movie. It's like stop-motion poetry. I read Minnis's poems and can imagine a heavy heartbeat (th-thump, th-thump) sound with each new phrase that pops up out of all the dots. And whenever there's lots and lots of dots between words (pg. 29, during the poem "Supervermillion"), I can imagine the heartbeat still sounding, even in the silence.

The dots really intrigue me. On one hand, they seem like such a waste of space. On the other, plenty of poets use blank space, so maybe Minnis isn't stretching it too far. I wondered why Minnis chooses to use all the dots instead of just blank space like most poets would. I think that she is acknowledging the sort of 'heartbeat' I can feel in the poetry. The poem is still very much alive in those spaces. The silence is not really silent.
One of the poems that really had this effect on me was "Pitcher". The images are so clear, I can almost feel the water splashing over me, soaking my shirt, the pitcher clanging on the ground as it bounces away.
I believe that all the dots give us time to process what Minnis is writing. And the dots as opposed to the spaces feels like she is telling us, 'no, this is not a moment just to breathe, this is a moment to really consider the image I am painting for you'. For example, in "Tiger", pg. 45: After "beautiful, unbroken vase" she gives us time to really see that vase, feel the clay curves ourselves, before moving on to the next thing. A few lines down, after another longer string of dots, she says "expansiveness", like a comment on what just happened in the poem. On the other hand, she uses less dots between words on the previous page when she says, "how I want to replicate...... them or re-create their arcs........ or put them in a spotlight...... against a black backdrop" because they are images that really fit together and need to be considered more closely as parts of one idea.
Another tool that stood out to me in Minnis's work was the use of color, particularly red. It reminded me of Greenfield's tree-tool. The set of poems in Zirconia made me think of modern paintings such as this one: http://bw-inc.deviantart.com/art/BLACK-WHITE-RED-12895843
The picture is mainly black and white, but there is some red, and the red that is there really pops out at you. Minnis has repeated references to blood and redness in general. One of the poems in the book is even called "Maroon" and another is "Cherry". I would like to explore this motif further. Red is known to be the first color the eye picks up on in a scene and is a color associated with drama and shocking things in general. I wonder if this is why Minnis uses the color so much or if it is because of some childhood trauma associated with blood that she has had to deal with. - reamsanddreams.blogspot.com/



“It is hard, at first, not to be disappointed with Chelsey Minnis’s aptly named first book, Zirconia, whose ellipses-studded interiors appear, on first inspection, gimmicky and cut-rate—undercooked and oversold.
However, Minnis, a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a keystone in Fence Book’s young American poets line, makes a starry debut in this slight but dazzling ravishment of phrase fragments and pearled ellipses.
Minnis’ effort is, in a word, brilliant, as the titular wink suggests. It is not, however, glaringly imitative, though the demonology it conjures is not unlike Sexton and Plath’s.
The book opens with the whimsical ‘A Speech About the Moon,’ a wild rumpus in couplets where the speaker importunes the moon and its schizophrenic symbology: ‘silver hitching ball,’ ‘placid sea monster,’ ‘silver leg iron’ (2). The elliptical moments, so much a fixture of what follows, enter the volume organically here, arising in moments of indecision, revision and ecstatic redirection. ‘A Speech’s’ unsettled and unsettling rhetoric, its relentless interrogations, function as both invocation and ars poetica: ‘I have to invent warm tawny roses that have never been seen before.// Then I fix the sheets which are twisted around my ankles and think, I have to be tormented.’ Overall, though, Minnis’ dark night of the soul is more slumber party, concluding with the epistemologically aphoristic ‘thoughts are like terrible ballet teachers with canes’ (‘A Speech’ 3).
In tone, Minnis is emphatically more Charlie’s Angels than Belle of Amherst, the poet-speaker wanting roughed-up by the stuff of life, to take as much as to dish, a wish made explicit in the poem ‘Uh’ which begins ‘..uh……….I want to wear hot pants . . . . and rest my boot on the back of a man’s neck . . . and . . . . rise out of arctic waters with curled icicles in my hair and a speargun’ (13). In Minnis’ blow-by-blow, such powerlust rebounds as self-punishment: ‘I am too petulant . . . and . . . I . . .want them to . . . centre death blows between . . . my shoulder blades . . . and . . . then . . . gently lick electrodes . . . and stick them to my temples’ (15).
There is something at once delightfully retro (read Nancy Sinatra) and tragically hip about Zirconia—a vision and revision that takes in the best of Anne Carson, C.D. Wright, and Alice Notley—and makes it playful, even campy. Zirconia‘s prose interludes (‘Report on the Babies,’ ‘The Skull Rings,’ ‘The Torturers,’ and ‘The Aquamarine’) represent Minnis at her most surreally deadpan, while giving the reader a badly-needed break from the gazillions of dime-store ellipses. In poetic prose matching Ponge tone for odd tone, Minnis rests the reader at ‘Report on the Babies,’ a close encounters with infants who make babbling overture to a childless speaker whose dark tone resembles Poe’s, given feminine intuition, an hour of down time, and a double espresso.
Though, in poems hung on pop fashion fixtures—furs, gemstones, dress-up Barbies—and righteous anger at a male establishment (‘Uh’s’ ‘and just want . . . to pluck the grey beards of old men . . . and . . . give them . . . hairline fractures’)—one detects a hint of the cliched post feminist, Minnis knows how and when to pull her punches, making the blows land as soft and satisfying as a good pillow fight. In ‘Big Doves’ the speaker arrives with ‘comfortable doves . . . to accomplish . . .my soft ideas . . . and . . . . the doves are shy . . . . because they flap around . . . in the areas . . . of the heart . . . that I want . . . to be . . . flexed . . . thrashed . . . spiraled and . . . neurally lathed’ (6).
Zirconia‘s glimmering phraseology, its ‘loose stone’ parlance, must be read to be fully appreciated, sprinkled, as it is, expertly across the page. While other experiments with fragmentation, notably Alice Notley’s recent work, overwhelm both the eye and cortex, Minnis is a maestro when it comes to word burnishing. The poems achieve their magnificence and translucence as much by space as by space interrupt. The word amalgams, both Latinate and vernacular, give the collection a characteristic alchemy evident in the decadent ‘Sectional,’ whose speaker sinks ‘into a reverie in leather . . . sectional couches . . . with caramel in my mouth’ (23), adding, ‘I am reliving . . . a moment and revolving . . . caramel as I am surrounded on all sides by . . . soft panels of genuine . . . leather . . . . launching my molars . . . into the cluster . . . in order to . . . locate . . . the nucleus . . .’
What saves Minnis’ Alberta prize-winning first collection from triviality is both sense and sensibility, as it consistently transforms the startlingly mundane into the phantasmagoric ‘Cherry’s': “I see you are kneeling. . . and raunchily . . . or ironically . . . scrubbing . . . the floors with your . . . naughty manual labor . . . but . . . you want to whisper your fears into the ear swirls of the wood . . .’ (27). What Minnis does better than any of her peers is not so much render moments as deepen and elongate them, most emblematically in the poem ‘Flashbulb,’ where the poet’s sprawling syntax descends like photons, like stardust in a burst aftermath. In ‘Flashbulb,’ ‘Uncut,’ and elsewhere, Minnis realizes the language-sustain lesser writer’s realize only as etude.
Minnis’ virtuosity and charm occasionally fail her in Zirconia, in poems like ‘Supervermillion’ and ‘Champagne,’ which come off sounding like Dr. Demento novelty tracks or B-52′s b-sides—but, overall, this is a remarkably sure-footed and enthused whole.
In the last third of the book, Minnis deftly weaves in what is, presumably, autobiography, as in ‘Primrose,’which relives the speaker’s mother’s rape, recalling ‘blood in the courtyard . . . and blood on the birdbath . . .and blood drizzled . . . on brown flagstones . . . as a red fox bared its teeth . . . white harts . . . froze . . . and snow-hares fled . . . and left . . . heartshaped footprints in the snow . . . that melted . . . in the spring when I was born . . . and it is torture . . . for my mother . . . that I am now luscious . . . and she is dead’ (41-42).
In the end, praise for Zirconia must end up in superlatives, though not the ‘diamond-quality,’ knock-off variety the title ironically anticipates. Minnis is careful not to undersell her gift in this first collection, whose dazzling moments belong both to a wildchild improviser and a sage conductor.”—Zachary Jack


CHELSEY MINNIS's Zirconia mines our shared material world more than our unconscious shades of language-meaning. In a pastoral moment, the speaker of "Sectional" consumes a caramel on a leather couch: "I run my hand along the leather unknowingly / as I oralize the caramel and soften it as I am on the . . . modular couch with padded armrests / where I can rest my arms / as I revisit sorrowful / and frightening moments / of happiness that must have occurred."
Minnis's work is post-advertising. She can make the entire aura of a thing wash over you with thoughts of yourself, "the sensual moment keeps splashing and unbuckling upon you like a replay" ("Pitcher"). The result (or the cause) is a kind of emotional synaesthesia with the physical. It's often hard to tell which came first, the emotion or the product. Our demons become things: "so that you may / not fear / such a property within yourself or / others" ("Tiger"). Or they come at us, in the opposite direction, from objects themselves as "airborn internal knowledge" ("Uncut").
These poems enact that protective and empathetic human instinct that makes us make ourselves metaphor. As Minnis writes in "Sternum," "at least simulated vulnerability is bearable / for those / who cannot / withstand unreasonable tenderness."
Minnis employs lengthy ellipses marked by extended series of periods; her poems take some getting used to, but it's worth it. Her devices prevent the eye from cheating the white space between stanzas its due of silence; the reader's experience of pause and meditation is linked directly to the poet's. - Robert B Strong



Don't deny the unicorn lover deep inside you. Doubt it, fear it, laugh at it, but don't deny it. Embrace it.

This message seems central to Zirconia, the debut collection by Chelsey Minnis and first winner of the Alberta Prize, launched last year by Fence Books. It's not a message limited to this work or this author, because the particular brand of sensuality/sentimentality at work here is one which I believe is in the zeitgeist: a "gurlesque" aesthetic, a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy.
It owes much, of course, to the work of Angela Carter and other feminist writers who relished a baroque masochism as they simultaneously sought to deconstruct the rape culture fairy tales all around them. Rikki Ducornet and others have continued the practice, and the recent Gothic-influenced poetry by Laura Mullen is another outgrowth.
But I'd suggest that Zirconia is representative of a new generation of women artists working in this vein, and that a particularly deadpan sense of humor and an attention to childish fantasy—to Americana girlhood in place of elaborate exoticism—is what sets this work apart. For those of us who were little girls during the burgeoning feminism of the 1970s, there developed a sensibility which walks the line between outrage and laughter, sexuality and innocence, raw and frilly. Chelsey Minnis's Zirconia is a thrilling example of this style.
Open to "Sectional," in which the narrator describes herself "sink[ing] into a reverie in leather/sectional couches/with caramel in my mouth." This fusion of sensual detail—the warmth of the leather, the suck and softening of the caramel, the implied tongues and hands and stickiness—with a determination to be languid, encapsulates the gurlesque style. "I exist in a blister of fantasy," Minnis writes in "Electronique," "and ripen with a dire/optimism." An iron glove cast in velvet.
Or start at the beginning of Zirconia and work your way through its garden of earthly delights: the book bristles with originality. One of the first things you'll notice as you flip through is Minnis's use of the extended ellipsis. Instead of line or stanza breaks, dotted lines separate the words and phrases in most of the poems here, so that the page is filled with waves of pinpricked text. The effect is part stutter, part studded, and although it takes a moment to acclimate to the device, it works remarkably well: Minnis has managed to invent a form which feels earned and reads seamlessly. The ellipses submerge the poems like J.W. Waterhouse's Ophelia paintings, glittering currents of lines giving way to petals of language.
Although most of the poems in the collection use this form, some do not, and they are among the most riveting works included. The first poem, "A Speech About the Moon," introduces the indulgent and melancholy voice we will come to know well:
I think, "The moon is mine and all the craters are mine." Then I begin to think, "I am covered with drizzling
grief.", "I have all the ice blue sinning birds.", "I
control the sea.", and "Everything sticks out of the
sea."
One of the marvelous things about this poem, and Minnis's writing in general, is how sustained it is. "A Speech About the Moon" is a two and a half page poem, all short statements, and yet every line is a delight and a surprise, partly because of the vulnerability Minnis channels ("Then I sit up and cup my hands over my nose and shake my head slowly back and forth.") and partly because the language is so smart ("I think, 'The thoughts are like terrible ballet teachers with canes.'")
And so gurlesque. The themes present in Zirconia—beauty, cruelty, other/daughterhood-as well as some of the recurring images-wings, fur, pearls—not to mention the title itself, with its tawdry, dreamy sparkle, led me back to the days of Stevie Nicks, pegasus suncatchers and Seventeen magazine's prom issue. Minnis fearlessly mines this terrain for all its faux glamour and real heartbreak. The second poem in the book, "Big Doves," starts off like the storyboard to a Bjork video—"doves / are rolling out of my heart / and / just rolling out of my heart / and molten ice is twisting out of my heart like a frozen / drink"—but eventually and gleefully escapes into pure wordlust, as if the narrator is luxuriating in a bath of consonants:
galaxy/roseate/aplomb/hauteur/epitome/slams/
lasers/deep emotions/awe/lucre/napes/vales/lava/and
anything else.
Did you all catch the "deep emotions" there? It is this self-mocking pseudo-petulance which adds to the gurlesque feel: a sense that all of this is a bit of a show. There are moments of extreme morbidity and anger in Zirconia, but even they take place poolside with a daquiri, as in "Uh," in which the narrator begs to be first a dominatrix and then scratched by jungle cats: "someone should knock me down / and press me against blue tile / and shuck / a gold sheath dress / off me / and push / a shiny buzzer / to make me slide down a glistening chute." Why? "Because / I am sique," she tells us, "of everyone and opposed to everyone" and the "siqueness" illustrates her ability to laugh at herself even as the frustration and wrath feel vivid and indulged. In Zirconia, the bullets are "round" and "plump."
Not every poem in the collection work equally well, and, at their weakest, the ellipses form and overload of sensual imagery feel forced and disjointed rather than urgent or specific. Page 29 of the book is entirely made up of dotted lines, and although I wanted Minnis to deserve this, it simply felt like it had to be done. The poem in which it is done ("Supervermilion") was not one of my favorites: its juxtapositions and fragments—"infrared / warpath / bloodlines / fireballs / redwoods / heartshaped / burned / nothing"—don't
transcend.
But this is immaterial. The vast majority of the book is pure delight. One of the funniest and most moving poems in the collection is "Report on the Babies," a prose poem which takes an absurdly scientific view on an infant conspiracy of cuteness. With the objectivity of an outsider and the precision of a (biological) clock, the narrator reports:
…on a bus to Pittsburgh a baby could not stop arching its back 8/21, baby with pink headband constricting 9/13, a baby throwing down the chew-toy three times in my favorite café, baby who emphatically did not want the bottle, but agreed to eat a chip (on diagonal)
10/24…
"I've seen the babies fall in love with me when their parents have no idea," our narrator insists. "A series of babies stronger and stranger than any before has been peeking at me. They continue to peek at me at a critical rate. Moreover, they seem to be enthralled in a rapture."
For readers looking to be similarly enthralled, I suggest Zirconia. - Arielle C. Greenberg


“‘I exist in a blister of fantasy,’ proclaims the narrator of this self-assured and often deeply satisfying debut. Similar in form, style, and rhetorical strategy, each of the poems in Zirconia is, in essence, an associative riff on a particular object (a tiger lily, a skull ring, the moon), or in some cases, a state of mind (grief, confusion, ecstasy). Minnis’s sharp-tongued, sexy, and somewhat juvenile narrator uses these obsessive, fetishistic examinations to both describe and insert the reader into a dream state-a kind of mythic consciousness, in which memory and desire transform the stuff of everyday life into charged symbols of, well, memory and desire.” —Joanna Smith Rakoff

Chelsey Minnis' collection of poems in Zirconia is colorful and emotional. Minnis jumps from one idea to the next without fluid transitions. However, the use of periods instead of empty space connect one idea to the next while simultaneously creating powerful separations to emphasize certain points. The language in Zirconia is often harsh, violent and sometimes grotesque. Disturbing images mingle with beautiful ones throughout the collection. This imagery can be found in the poem, Maroon, which starts,
.............my bloodsticky........................................wet......................................

.......................................................................................................................

..............................................................baby..................................................

........is..............an auburn...and.............bloody.......beauty..............................

............who.....................................................................................................

............shined........inside........................a slippery milky sac..........................
This illustration of the inner workings of natality is somewhat disturbing and grotesque, but at the same time, the language is beautiful and enticing to the reader. This use of language and imagery creates a strange balance in Zirconia and the scales are usually not even.
The structure of the poems in Zirconia is often challenging to follow but it is also enjoyable. The use of periods allows Minnis to emphasize certain words and images in a new and different way than other authors. I had to pause on several words and consider the meaning of the spaces in the collective whole of the poem. This new and different use of structure was enticing to me as a reader and was a powerful use of the space on the page.
However, in contrast to my last point, I especially enjoyed the poems, The Skull Ring, and The Aquamarine, which use simple paragraph form and no obvious pattern. These two poems illustrate the personality and emotions of the writer. I enjoyed how straight-forward and simple these poems were but at the same time, I felt as though the intended meaning was layered and pointed towards more than what was being said. For example, in The Aquamarine, the concept of being invisible in certain situations is an important point about social interaction and one's perceived place in society. The simple use of structure in these two poems makes them more accessible and emotionally powerful to me. - Nick Barron
Part of the allure of a prose poem is that there is one continuous "line"; every word is on a level playing field, so the content of the poem takes center stage. In her first book, Chelsey Minnis has discovered a way to write prose poetry while uniquely stressing individual words and phrases, thus creating a brand of prose poetry that draws attention to itself internally without sacrificing the very thing that makes it operate. Her technique: to populate the prose poems with lengthy ellipses, sometimes ranging hundreds of periods in length, creating varying distances yet maintaining connections. Actually, it is inaccurate to call these true "ellipses," since nothing at all is omitted from her poems; rather, they function as ligaments:
............when my mother.......................................
....................was raped.........................................
......................................................................
...a harpsichord began to play........................................
....................................red candles melted....and.........
.......spilled down the mantle........................................
................................there was blood in the courtyard......
.............and blood on the birdbath................................
...and blood drizzled....on brown flagstones..........................
........................as a red fox bared its teeth..................
Let's get one thing straight: the abundant periods in Zirconia are no more a distraction than the absence of all punctuation is in Merwin's work. In fact, if we take a poem from the book and lineate it, we produce a very Merwin-esque poem:
and it is torture for my mother
that I am now luscious
and she is dead
and that I have
bare shoulders
and a flower behind my ear
as I beat gentleman rapists
with bronze statuettes
so that the blood
oozes down their handsome sideburns
or give them
a poisoned mushroom
or corsages and corsages of gunshot
We've spent decades praising Merwin for his innovations, and Minnis deserves to be extended a similar courtesy; her poems, like his, offer a meandering single line with no definitive beginning, middle, or end. Thus, she manages a relaxed and readable tone, yet retains the enjambed quality of a well-crafted line break. Minnis proves that you can have it both ways.
She is no one-trick pony, though. While much of the book's mystique arises from her playful formal constructions, there is real charm at work here ("When I was a young girl, my parents hated me and wouldn't give me the right kind of food. I used to steal Barbies and hide them in unique places all over the house, but I took no joy in it.") The voice of the book teases us into following wherever it wanders. Likewise, the characters that inhabit Minnis's poems are somewhat cartoonish, yet we never question their reality. They have exaggerated allegorical professions (such as "head torturer" and "terrible ballet teacher") and they inexplicably prevent Minnis from living out her fantasies:
...uh..........I want to wear hot pants............................................
..................................................................................
..................................................and rest my boot on the back
of a man's neck...............................................................
Much of the book concentrates on what Minnis desires, or what she feels she's ready to experience ("I'm ready to plunge into furs.....and reject the standards of my past"). In this sense, she offers direct mental transcriptions of her craving to be released from the now. Her poems are moments of decadent sexuality and unattainable fantasy, and they demonstrate what happens when the world consistently gets between us and what we want. Minnis's world is a world of conspiracy. And she's gotten it right: In the end, we suspect everyone's in on it but her. - John Erhardt

Book Reviews: Zirconia and Miss America by Cole Swensen