Emotional Support Peacock by Nada Gordon

Nada Gordon is one of our most sumptuous and aesthetically rigorous poets—and before you ask— No. No contradiction. —Vladislav Davidzon

What I hold dear in Nada Gordon’s poems would arouse an “oh dear, no” from Virginia Woolf, whose words I nonetheless borrow: “the typical American defect of over-ingenuity and an uneasy love of decoration; as though they had not yet learnt the art of sitting still.”—Benjamin Friedlander

Impressive as it is for it to have written at all, that an emotional support animal has invented a heteronym as singular, complex and intriguing as Nada Gordon simple boggles the mind. After reading this book, you will never look at poets, or peacocks, the same way again. —Rob Stanton

A flourless chocolate cake of the imagination, Emotional Support Peacock shakes the gluten-free world to its very foundations, crying out “I. AM. NoBODY. R U? NoBODY? 2?” into the void, which responds, “Sheesh, it’s 5 a.m. Shut the fck up and go back to sleep.” A mittelshmertz journey you won’t forget. —Maria Damon

Nada Gordon is the kind of poet who inspires fanatical devotion. Emotional Support Peacock is the kind of book whose lines are carved into the soles of Onitsuka Tigers, tattooed in radiating arcs on shoulder blades, chanted on TikTok by fashionable Pee-Wee, Ken-doll cosplayers. “I’ll slurp the love / Right out of my own hands,” sings The Weeknd. “Loose with alabaster skin, soft as kid gloves, / All covered with sticky goo,” croons Elvis Costello, while a small porcelain doll with haunting eyes stuffs a peacock into its horrible vinyl purse. —Joseph Thomas

The works in Emotional Support Peacock hang and dangle like an indented mercury globe. They uselessly punish, kinetically, going mad with grotesque parrot-head umbrellas or knee-hugging elves with randy eyes. You’ll want to enter this bizarre aesthetic so as to confirm the identity of toy and poem. So much we care about is not real. These poems prove it. —Norman Fischer

Some poems are among the most memorable events of our lives, like stepping on a landmine. True, you lose a limb, but it grows back, spiritually. —Jonathan Brown

Nada Gordon goes AI one better as she loads her cart with the android spawn of our socially
mediated cosmos and orders up a sensual, rococo body of work adorned with the baubles,
bangles, and bright shiny beads of a flarfist lexicon. “Every day I wake up and ask myself, how
can I be a better bon vivant?” she writes. Poetry has never been more ruthless—or hilarious!
—Kit Robinson

The Marchioness de Idlewild remarked to me just the other day: “ … in all my decades of immersion in the abrasion which is contemporary poetry, I have never yet had the sensations as produced by a reading of Madame De Gordon’s newest volume. One is lifted aloft by Exhalations of Language as though carried sweetly by fantastical feathered beings through a strange, quixotic, yet emotionally prescient World and then one is suddenly thrown into cold water (rather like the pool after a schvitz) or slapped! into a realm in which philosophical realization, self-admonition and cultural retort dispel any sense of fantasy or escape. I do not know what to make of it and have ruminated night and day as to how to receive this strange amalgamation. My dear, you must read it … ”—Kimberly Lyons

In spirit closer to the wild geese than the peacock, Nada Gordon brings together a panoply of voices, including the squawk, the screech, the whisper, the whistle, all of which come together—finally, ultimately—and in language both harsh and exciting, to announce our place in the family of things. One cannot but feel uplifted into the Rapture.—Diana Fisher

In a school play of Beauty and the Beast patterned after the Cocteau film Nada plays the key role of the fire flickering in the fireplace.—Adam de Graff

The NBC peacock was owned by a weapons manufacturer, but Nada has freed it, and the result is molting and revolting.”—Chris Stroffolino

I heartily endorse everything Nada makes. However, my friends, the peacocks of Terminal Island, do not work for free. We are glorious, loud, and proud.
— The Somerville Turkey. Catherine Daly

Civilized. Yet highly pretentious.—Sharon Mesmer

Ora che ho scritto un blurb per questo libro, non riesco più a smettere: li sogno di notte e mi vengono in mente anche quando mangio e quando sono in bagno. Ormai è un’ossessione, potrei perfino finire con lo scrivere un libro di soli blurb!—Francesco Deotto

A lambently loving lavage of language.—Hippolyte Fizeau

Nada Gordon is a poet was born in Oakland and lives in Brooklyn. She is the author of nine books: foriegnn bodie, Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?, V. Imp., Swoon, Folly, Scented Rushes, Vile Lilt, Selected Poems: The Sound Princess, and Emotional Support Peacock. Although she is a multimodal artist, she doesn’t work “at the intersection” of anything; if she did, she would have become a crossing guard. She is a founding member of the notorious and glorious Flarf Collective and has been widely anthologized. Her work has been translated into French, Japanese, Dutch, Romanian, Chinese, Hebrew, and Burmese.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 138 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-440-6

$18

Pre-Orders Welcome