Showgirls – The Movie in Sestinas by Jeffery Conway

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W. B. Yeats famously asks in “Among School Children.” Jeffery Conway’s cornucopia of poetic DVD commentary encircles that unanswerable question. Calling to the stage the gold-glittered divas of Showgirls, Conway uses the sestina’s circular dance to celebrate each frame of cinema’s campiest of stripper films.

—Daniel Nester

It has been far too long since a collection of poems summoned us to a world of performers and voyeurs, catfights and choreography, lip gloss and lap dances. In fact, this has never been done before, and Jeffery Conway’s Showgirls: The Movie in Sestinas digs deeper than any collection in recent memory. Conway proves that the sestina form is more than a card trick, but rather a mechanism for uncovering hidden commentaries on the human condition, its soundtrack unfurling layers of film direction, cultural criticism, and pure emotion. Drop your inhibitions at the doorway of this book, and let it rock you.

—Mary Biddinger

Jeffery Conway’s books include The Album That Changed My Life (Cold Calm Press, 2006), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry, and two collaborations with Lynn Crosbie and David Trinidad, Chain Chain Chain (Ignition Press, 2000) and Phoebe 2002: An Essay in Verse (Turtle Point Press, 2003). His work appears in a variety of magazines and journals, including The World, The Portable Lower East Side, B City, Brooklyn Review, McSweeney’s, and Court Green. His poems can also be found in many anthologies, such as The Incredible Sestina Anthology and Rabbit Ears: The First Anthology of Poetry About TV.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 76 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-168-9

$16

Showgirls- The Movie in Ses… by Geoffrey Gatza