Dominus by Tiffany Troy

If logos, the law of the father, could be personified, the “Master” of Tiffany Troy’s devastating debut collection Dominus is its Hegelian sine qua non. It follows the journey of a “Baby Tiger” whose lyric powers and canonical, mythic transmutations (of Dostoevsky, Whitman, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and the epic Greeks) evince the apprenticeship of a genius. Is it wrong to “want life to matter” amid a wasteland of toxic positivity, double whoppers, trains, and “fathers beyond reproof”? If work involves subjection, rage, and shame, is poetry—the “Lyrical I” of a “shredded soul”—a higher legislature capable of revolt? Darkly funny, virtuosic, and formally ingenious, Dominus offers a cathartic transcendence from paternalist and systemic oppressions, via a symbiotic power dynamic whose pathos rivals Cordelia and Lear. What Troy forges in this trial by fire isn’t “corporate professional” compliance but a soul: the Nietzschean transformations of her speaker move through “the light Blake calls experience” to arrive at sublimity: “the golden center of the heart.”

— VIRGINIA KONCHAN, AUTHOR OF BEL CANTO

To walk through the world of Tiffany Troy’s astonishing debut collection, Dominus, is to honor the scalding “month that leaves like a lamb” and to acknowledge the “shimmering lunacy” of our world divided by labor, “Google Calendar,” “QuickBooks season,” human brutality, and “how evil always justifies itself through mundaneness / and bureaucracy.” Dominus is origin story: “In the beginning, all we could do was eat, shit, and money. / Deposit and spend money in takeout places where we died.” The speaker is often Cassandra swirling within and against her tragic consequence of speaking the truth-utterance in the face of any cost: the Doctor’s threat of exile, or “She can no longer look herself in the mirror,” or “Knife in hand… ‘To Hell with God.’” The most profound truth Troy impresses is a blueprint to interrogate the inferno of our everyday lives, lyre in hand, each “horrid spring” without compromising the music which survives us, as to never “kill the love in [our] hearts,” and face with dignity the Master and “myopic god who’s fuming.”

— CARLIE HOFFMAN, AUTHOR OF WHEN THERE WAS LIGHT

Fusing post-confessional bildungsroman with an allegory of late-capitalist corruption, Dominus astounds me with its heat and light, from its earliest “hope for all workers / to receive what they deserve” to its ultimate dread that “You either cooperate / or starve.” Powered by the combustion that unfolds when a valiant creative spirit confronts the “hellish landscape” of one rigged system after another, Troy transforms her speaker’s manifold subjugation into a spectacle of lyric clap back and alchemical escape act—a performance in which even defeat, always at least partly inevitable, is rendered with such tenderness, wit, and truthfulness to human life, it takes on positive value: “Between being afraid and falling asleep, / I curl into a little ball on the wooden floor.” Championing our tired and our poor, the immigrant workers and the “huddled masses yearning to get to work on time,” the outsiders consigned to “a panorama of never belonging” and “every girl who ever thought / maybe she had wronged the world by existing,” Dominus is as insistent on justice as it is baffled by its own hope, and its indomitable, distinctive voice has a power unlike that of any debut collection I’ve ever read, or of any book in recent memory.

— TIMOTHY DONNELLY, AUTHOR OF CHARIOT

Tiffany Troy is a critic, translator, and poet. She is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert / El próximo desierto (Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her literary criticism, translation, and creative writing are published in The Adroit Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, EcoTheo Review, Hong Kong Review of Books, Latin American Literature Today, The Laurel Review, The Los Angeles Review, Matter, New World Writing, Rain Taxi, and Tupelo Quarterly, where she is Managing Editor.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 116 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-441-3

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