Directed by Lilly Obscure by Dana Curtis

This book is full of visionary poetics, of poems which stare into various sorts of suns and films and pseudo-biographies; it is full of lenses, like scattered raindrops on windshields. But essentially it is a mad dance with imagination and fear and eros and error (“I saw the world split in two/like a razor across the eye”). I believe deeply in all these characters, heroines and film-historical lies, all these glittering poems, as deeply as I believe in the “real” films and fantasies upon which they play. Reading this book is to be consumed by as well as to consume an impossible, deeply necessary reality.

Bin Ramke, author of Earth on Earth

Dana Curtis has found a perfect metaphor to grapple with being a woman living in America during our time —the surreal and sinister world of cult film and film noir. The book is a love letter to the disturbing creative vision of Lilly Obscure as well as a love letter for our world on the brink of apocalypse. “Everything is dying or waiting to die,” she tells us in the first poem. In poem after poem, Curtis displays her dazzling mastery of imagery, imagination, and language. But it’s not just a linguistic tour-de-force, it is equally concerned with how hard it is to be a body in the world, especially a marginalized body. “It’s time to really think/ about the hat check girl, about/ what she deserves. About what we all deserve.” With a clear-eyed voice and a conviction unequalled in her previous work, Curtis is at the peak of her craft. The book never breaks from the character she has so painstakingly created. This collection addresses hard questions and isn’t afraid to admit bitter truths. “Some questions cannot be answered./ Some diseases cannot be cured.” This is a fierce book of protest, proving that through art, even if we don’t have answers, we can create meaning. “I held up my head/ like a torch, like a green/ eyed woman watching/the eloquence of times.”

—Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House (Four Way Books, 2023)

Dana Curtis’ third full-length collection of poetry, Wave Particle Duality, was published by BlazeVOX Books you 2017. Her second collection, Camera Stellata, was published by CW Books, and her first book, The Body’s Response to Famine, won the Pavement Saw Press Transcontinental Poetry Prize. She is the editor-in-chief of Elixir Press and lives in Colorado

Book Information:

· Paperback: 106 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-430-7

$18

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