Savage Pageant

Jessica Q. Stark

Savage Pageant recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, Savage Pageant reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.

Print: $18

What People Are Saying

Bhanu Kapil

Jessica Stark's Savage Pageant is a map, an "undulation," a "fold," something lightly sketched then traced on "something blackened, worn-out, and organized." Stark's brilliant move in this powerful new work is to problematize the paper itself: the surfaces that receive the many marks that a poet, an inhabitant, an animal, an archivist or an audience-member might make. What a brilliant writer. What a lovely and strange book.

Dorothea Lasky

Part poetry book, part collection of private, personal, and public histories, part summons, part rune, this book takes you headfirst into the other world where all you can do is swim past your own hurt and traumas into the sunshine hole of the unreal. It's a book we must remember as we begin to forget ourselves. I'll risk it all to say that we need this book for all of time, to take with us as a guide from here until the everlasting, because, as this book says to us, "We are only here for a/ short time."

Vi Khi Nao

The body of poetry needs a new script, and Jessica Q. Stark is more than happy to oblige. At the height of her multi-tasking, birthing simultaneously son and book, she holds you captive with her carnival performance of ingenious gestures, where language and motherhood play informal games of anatomic brilliance and take you through her sanitary mayhem of pandemoniac beauty and birth.

Inside the Book

Category:: Poetry
Binding:: Perfect Bound
Dimensions: 6" X 9"
Publication Date:: March 2020
ISBN:: 9780982617731

Reviews

Vi Khi Nao

Even with a personal calculator, I could not mathematically or scientifically calculate or suture Jessica Q Stark’s sharp, elegant poems into one voice, a voice that will speak us through the “murky-watered babe” and into any unforeseen fire. These...poems, like...invisible, flickering alphabets, seem to arrive from a place of imminent birth. The importance of naming a child – is it like how poems are born? The same hunting for internet lists? The search for the great “well-lit verbs” – the ones with ten fingers and ten toes? Stark wastes no time in clamoring the foreseen footsteps of her poetic voice into a flawless realm of concrete, systematic abstraction. There are no missteps in her couplets. They arrive to us confidently and fully formed, much to our awe, like a child sliding out of the birth canal devoid of nine months of hard labor. Her exactness is well articulated and ventilated, always with “salt” and “melody” in her poems so you know, as readers (of course), they haven’t been “exhumed” or been in an “unmarked grave” or chemically born for your pleasure. There are bodies in her poems. Some are alive and well, and others – a fairytale from the ground and up. There is, of course, forensic science, clavicle and ants, music, dried grass, hope and ashtray, in them as well. They don’t behave like animals in her work. Nonetheless, Stark has a swaying way of gathering these “well-lit” nouns together – like gathering evidences from a birth-written crime scene – and compelling them to operate as one elegant mouthpiece for her highly intelligent state of awareness. She has a way with us, dividing us with her well-calculated syllables, surprising us by erasing us from time as we turn the soft corners of her stanzas. Yes, her couplets take us into unanticipated territories. We often do not know where they will take us, but in her cool and assertive hands, we arrive at the end of each of her poems fresh and renewed and awed. Her persuasive intelligence teaches us that language can leak, but it can also erect secure roofs over our tongues. Even if we open our mouths like a “plastic crate” – we are never doomed.

From the Book

Ariel

— With hair up-staring—then, like reeds, not hair— Was the first man that leaped, cried, “Hell is empty And all the devils are here.” —Shakespeare’s The Tempest

Darkness grew a little finger
and led the company

of men into the sea. Driven mad with
the after-places of memory:

the trace substance, the years
of sleep roused by the crack.

There was nowhere else to go
but over they cried.

There were no   instructions on
how   to create an illusion.

So swiftly inside a storm they recall:

a spirit released from   prison
for service was still a

prisoner. The ship   and its rich

garments were breaking apart.

The Burn Pits

It is possible to not know what lies
underneath your skin.

The smell of gas, a minor accident—
say fuel element failure.

We touch the pieces of dried grass
on our descent, gather

back together a bundle in place
of a vocabulary for names.

The great misstep, the human element:
defect as communal birthright.

And how to remember what was
never written? The memo

recommends departure, the memo
suggests trace substances

still in the hold—hold them still
leaking on roofs over tongue.

A stubborn breed, this animal. The
only retribution: unforeseen fire.

We pour our mistakes into black pits,
close the lid, and hope that the

smoke story might not reach the frontal
lobes of chain-link and ashtray.

We drink the water, we brush
our teeth with the water,

and force another match into
flame now growing dim by the

march of palms. No time to put it
out and no time to waste on

exit music. There is a rumor I
shouldn’t tell you, but I will.

Count your hands by syllables,
divide what’s left by the root.

We are not who we say we are and
the farther we go back, we’re

tracing blood—filling bodies with
this chemical breath, sending out

piecemeal parcels of well-lit verbs.