Gina Abelkop, I Eat Cannibals, co-im-press, 2014.
The second collection from poet and Birds of Lace editor Gina Abelkop operates as a meditation on what it means to have and inhabit a body, finding herself both human and un-human while navigating the ether between the physical and spiritual. Intertwined throughout are meditations on temporality, home, and ownership, explored through dance music and a visceral, ever-evolving relationship to the land.
In I Eat Cannibals, the spacey-smart, anxious-bold, seriously funny speaker plays every possible role—zoo animal, redhead, pioneer, corset, priest—opposite women who are crushes, heroines and BFFs. The poems channel like mediums at seances, and they time-travel (though admittedly mostly just to shop), drawing Dickinson and Sharon Tate into a contemporary world of "spiritually iridescent horror" where the dominant mode of being is Complicit. "For what I've done / I'm sorry," Abelkop writes, "I do it / every day." Readers of this work are glad she does.—Arielle Greenberg
Gina Abelkop, Darling Beastlettes, Apostrophe Books, 2012.
A mix of violence and humor offers just a glimpse of Ablekop s poetic vision whereby in poem after poem she explores the gritty and sometimes sinister side of sexuality in mock-romantic and surrealist fashion: A murder / glided in last night, nested / in your bouffant, stayed / for months. With a biting wit she takes aim at shattered domesticity, while also exploring the often bizarre and disturbing realm of gender politics. This is an ominous, sometimes Gothic universe where the jagged terrain of the human body becomes a canvas for uncanny scenes full of perversity and complexity, beauty and brutality. Each poem feels like a collage made from snapshots, memories, or the fractured mise-en-scène of wives and women historical, imagined, mythological, fabulist, and cinematic. While grappling with fear, desire, lust, and uncertainty, the frenzied inhabitants of Ablekop s world oscillate between prayer and cannibalism, love and violence, laughter and sex.
Darling Beastlettes, with medievally contemporary vocabulary and analogy, overflows with brutal shock-value that is offensive and upsetting and forces us to talk about it, dream about it and eventually come back to it. --Crystal Hartman, Cutbank
Have you ever read something and come across a phrase or a line that made you stop and think DAMN I *wish* I had written that! ? That happened more than a few times as I read Darling Beastlettes... Poet Gina Abelkop, founder and editor of feminist press Birds of Lace, is supremely gifted at creating haunting, otherworldly images and turning out gorgeous verse. At the heart of her poems are women, real and imagined, recognizable and authentic. Adroitly observant, the themes Gina tackles aren t new (gender roles, sexuality, femininity, love, lust, etc) but they feel that way due to the welcome freshness and honesty of her perspective. --Jaclyn Michelle
A phenomenally strange, unexpected poet. If you feel like the thrill of poetry that you felt as a beginner is gone, that you re familiar with most anything that can happen in a poem, Abelkop s book Darling Beastlettes will change your mind so much that you should prepare yourself to rethink bestiality, because she makes it romantic in the way that Nabokov made pedophilia seem beautiful. --Yala , blog
Mrs. de Winter Rides Again
I pleasured and came dreaming about him slaughtering
her. As a fantasy, I liked it rather well.
I can put on any dress I like and he loves. I can drive
to any balmy province and still he has bludgeoned her
down, because she was a trollop and I am his wife.
I am a plain and kind wife. I am the wife he loves.
If she’d rotted from the inside out everyone
would’ve mourned. Instead now they haunt, me
and you and anyone who’s ever loved to see a beautiful,
live thing, which is everyone. Don’t you forget it.
It’s why I’m the wife and she’s the corpse.
It’s why I wake up and smile. I can forgive anything
so long as he loves only me. It’s this powerful gust
of air and I can’t stop it churning through me,
blasting me skinless. I don’t think I have a choice. I think
I enjoy not having a choice, some days. Other days,
I weep in the library because were I to choose otherwise—
if such a choice existed— I’d cease to fantasy. I’d go to sleep
at night and wake up remembering nothing. I’d never
smile. I’d probably draw everything my eyes chanced upon.
Grown, No Thank You
Whating maketh me feel so big a hate Them lily-livering
bitch-faced strangler women Of a breed I am usually want
to love with mine squalling pucey bosom I love them
bitch-faced babes on usual Oh no not this time Yes this
timing is wrong I think about it and it is like one big
yellow green loogie hocked into an eye Whose eye Not
her eye God forbid Don’t co-mingle our body beats Please
Act not likey a little wittle baby boot Strap it to your
thigh instead Wear piggy pantaloon baby boots as if
you were a strangler woman Which you are By the way
You are Yes you like strangling I like to pinch
pinch a little bit of thick thigh Every time I say it I wheeze
If only not to set mine weasley miniature eyes If the eyes
are not big you have a very ugly face I admit to it I live
in it Besides the point which is Oooo this big girl hate
Sucker
Bland meat, suck pig you, um
little little little! Suck you um,
up like a bitty tri-tip Lovely bun
in my whacked out tram
I give in to the whim of it
Baby beets and bossy women I want
A Fleetwood Mac t-shirt But I want it
To say “crystal visions” and I want it
to say I keep them to myself
Because of course I do I write them down
I placate my mama-brain She’s not picky
She just liked to eat after all- don’t
forget- we’re of the same brick trip,
you and I We ate of similar stone
Now what’s there to strap
together but my harness Your bit
I am not alluding to sex I do really
mean horses I do really mean meat
I do lay down at night I do
pick a wedding dress for Margaret
Flimsy silk Looks good I’m not seventeen
I’m a sucker A sick sucker in love
from Dora Sharlock Presents: Ladies of the ‘80s
‘Lo, tinder and hold–
reverse the valley!
Up over them big mountains done in
salt-slitted snow breathes my town
Manipulating valley, town slopped
down amongst sky and farther’n
sea Where I make my living
dancing for the good great
men who manhandle our land drawing
gold from untidy gulches Burying
their children
I sneak away, lay by the river
Hold sweet Anna’s hand in our shared
wooden bedroom When
I tell you more you will be
unsurprised and bidden by
your good faith to congratulate
our happiness in spite of
its propriety-dissolving practice
Grand House
Up with the land
Up with the land
I came into it and it came
to me Mar not your song or fruit for it
Is coming in with the land Along with the sky
I am feeling it in you only a little bit Get it
together Incantatorily Go into that house Go
On Voluptuousness, Time Travel and Lesbianism
The closest you can get to being a cannibal without being jailed is eating another woman’s pussy blood. This is only cannibalism if you’re a woman (defined as feeling a feeling of “I am a Woman.”) Only lesbians can be cannibals. “Your love is so edible to me! I eat cannibals!” sing Total Coelo. When I heard the song- the beat and then the words- I knew that it was a song for lesbians. Last night when I was in class I knew I was a lesbian because I couldn’t stop thinking, as the professor talked about Nietzche and Wagner and the pure emotive living that is music, that more than anything in the world I wanted to be getting fisted by this woman I want. Fucking was on my mind because I am reading Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay and she writes quite lustily. For example, she writes of one lover whose “favorite time of year was summer, when she wanted me to use cucumbers, zucchini, and corn on the cob as organic dildos.”
Fuck the use of “purple prose” as a putdown. Flowery, too-pretty words strung together with an air of purpose, almost certainly female: bad bad bad form, ladies. Of course if you are doing bad form because you are aware it is the way you’re meant to live then you know that lavender prose (and let’s give it some justice by granting the lushly sneering jibe towards women’s work a more defined shade of color: that which marks the cannibals) is the way to go. Lavender prose can look deceptively simple if you say the words randomly but stitched together in perfect order they will immediately bloom your entirety in voluptuous, bombshell pink roses.
James Baldwin is one person who somewhat recently saved my life (operating under the belief that one’s life is continuously saved throughout a lifetime). Not because of giving up but just needing a reason (which grows in you every minute) to spend days awake, and some nights too. There is a time in the middle of night with my door closed when it truly feels like 1800-something, even with my computer in front of me. I time travel in dreams which is one of the most spectacular, hysterically wonderful things that has ever happened to me.
Have you ever read something and come across a phrase or a line that made you stop and think DAMN I *wish* I had written that! ? That happened more than a few times as I read Darling Beastlettes... Poet Gina Abelkop, founder and editor of feminist press Birds of Lace, is supremely gifted at creating haunting, otherworldly images and turning out gorgeous verse. At the heart of her poems are women, real and imagined, recognizable and authentic. Adroitly observant, the themes Gina tackles aren t new (gender roles, sexuality, femininity, love, lust, etc) but they feel that way due to the welcome freshness and honesty of her perspective. --Jaclyn Michelle
A phenomenally strange, unexpected poet. If you feel like the thrill of poetry that you felt as a beginner is gone, that you re familiar with most anything that can happen in a poem, Abelkop s book Darling Beastlettes will change your mind so much that you should prepare yourself to rethink bestiality, because she makes it romantic in the way that Nabokov made pedophilia seem beautiful. --Yala , blog
Mrs. de Winter Rides Again
I pleasured and came dreaming about him slaughtering
her. As a fantasy, I liked it rather well.
I can put on any dress I like and he loves. I can drive
to any balmy province and still he has bludgeoned her
down, because she was a trollop and I am his wife.
I am a plain and kind wife. I am the wife he loves.
If she’d rotted from the inside out everyone
would’ve mourned. Instead now they haunt, me
and you and anyone who’s ever loved to see a beautiful,
live thing, which is everyone. Don’t you forget it.
It’s why I’m the wife and she’s the corpse.
It’s why I wake up and smile. I can forgive anything
so long as he loves only me. It’s this powerful gust
of air and I can’t stop it churning through me,
blasting me skinless. I don’t think I have a choice. I think
I enjoy not having a choice, some days. Other days,
I weep in the library because were I to choose otherwise—
if such a choice existed— I’d cease to fantasy. I’d go to sleep
at night and wake up remembering nothing. I’d never
smile. I’d probably draw everything my eyes chanced upon.
Grown, No Thank You
Whating maketh me feel so big a hate Them lily-livering
bitch-faced strangler women Of a breed I am usually want
to love with mine squalling pucey bosom I love them
bitch-faced babes on usual Oh no not this time Yes this
timing is wrong I think about it and it is like one big
yellow green loogie hocked into an eye Whose eye Not
her eye God forbid Don’t co-mingle our body beats Please
Act not likey a little wittle baby boot Strap it to your
thigh instead Wear piggy pantaloon baby boots as if
you were a strangler woman Which you are By the way
You are Yes you like strangling I like to pinch
pinch a little bit of thick thigh Every time I say it I wheeze
If only not to set mine weasley miniature eyes If the eyes
are not big you have a very ugly face I admit to it I live
in it Besides the point which is Oooo this big girl hate
Sucker
Bland meat, suck pig you, um
little little little! Suck you um,
up like a bitty tri-tip Lovely bun
in my whacked out tram
I give in to the whim of it
Baby beets and bossy women I want
A Fleetwood Mac t-shirt But I want it
To say “crystal visions” and I want it
to say I keep them to myself
Because of course I do I write them down
I placate my mama-brain She’s not picky
She just liked to eat after all- don’t
forget- we’re of the same brick trip,
you and I We ate of similar stone
Now what’s there to strap
together but my harness Your bit
I am not alluding to sex I do really
mean horses I do really mean meat
I do lay down at night I do
pick a wedding dress for Margaret
Flimsy silk Looks good I’m not seventeen
I’m a sucker A sick sucker in love
from Dora Sharlock Presents: Ladies of the ‘80s
‘Lo, tinder and hold–
reverse the valley!
Up over them big mountains done in
salt-slitted snow breathes my town
Manipulating valley, town slopped
down amongst sky and farther’n
sea Where I make my living
dancing for the good great
men who manhandle our land drawing
gold from untidy gulches Burying
their children
I sneak away, lay by the river
Hold sweet Anna’s hand in our shared
wooden bedroom When
I tell you more you will be
unsurprised and bidden by
your good faith to congratulate
our happiness in spite of
its propriety-dissolving practice
Grand House
Up with the land
Up with the land
I came into it and it came
to me Mar not your song or fruit for it
Is coming in with the land Along with the sky
I am feeling it in you only a little bit Get it
together Incantatorily Go into that house Go
On Voluptuousness, Time Travel and Lesbianism
The closest you can get to being a cannibal without being jailed is eating another woman’s pussy blood. This is only cannibalism if you’re a woman (defined as feeling a feeling of “I am a Woman.”) Only lesbians can be cannibals. “Your love is so edible to me! I eat cannibals!” sing Total Coelo. When I heard the song- the beat and then the words- I knew that it was a song for lesbians. Last night when I was in class I knew I was a lesbian because I couldn’t stop thinking, as the professor talked about Nietzche and Wagner and the pure emotive living that is music, that more than anything in the world I wanted to be getting fisted by this woman I want. Fucking was on my mind because I am reading Tales of the Lavender Menace by Karla Jay and she writes quite lustily. For example, she writes of one lover whose “favorite time of year was summer, when she wanted me to use cucumbers, zucchini, and corn on the cob as organic dildos.”
Fuck the use of “purple prose” as a putdown. Flowery, too-pretty words strung together with an air of purpose, almost certainly female: bad bad bad form, ladies. Of course if you are doing bad form because you are aware it is the way you’re meant to live then you know that lavender prose (and let’s give it some justice by granting the lushly sneering jibe towards women’s work a more defined shade of color: that which marks the cannibals) is the way to go. Lavender prose can look deceptively simple if you say the words randomly but stitched together in perfect order they will immediately bloom your entirety in voluptuous, bombshell pink roses.
James Baldwin is one person who somewhat recently saved my life (operating under the belief that one’s life is continuously saved throughout a lifetime). Not because of giving up but just needing a reason (which grows in you every minute) to spend days awake, and some nights too. There is a time in the middle of night with my door closed when it truly feels like 1800-something, even with my computer in front of me. I time travel in dreams which is one of the most spectacular, hysterically wonderful things that has ever happened to me.
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