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. - Bhanu Kapil 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." - Dorothea Lasky 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. - Vi Khi Nao |
