January’s pick for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club is A Beautiful Name for a Girl by Kirsten Kaschock. It’s from Ahsahta Press, and it’s Kaschock’s second collection of poems. For a sample of her work, follow me below the fold.
Angel, Boxed : a Poetics
To fit, disarticulate. Angels are coherence intensified to the point immediately prior to the point (non-dimensional) of god’s face. If hacking, if pieces are no option, can an angel be contorted into box? Can you fold a blue flame? A sword? Or would that preclude genocide, retribution—be “unnatural”? Angels have no nature, existing as a midway. A path between the freakish but not a dharma, as you cannot ride one. On the left, freakishuman—on the right, freakish gulf where all freakish was once engulfed. How then to cube an angel? Frieze. They are stone fish anyway. I don’t like them. Anything you do to get the angel in the box is acceptable. Is poem. Make them crystalline. No, don’t. The shatter trope’s too democratic, too a little bit for everyone, too through a glasnost sharply. Acid then. Yes, immerse an angel in chemistry. A set piece. Sublimation. Do not let the angel pass through liquid. Do not let the angel make water. Interrogate. Collect her steam in a red balloon. Box the balloon.
