Last week, my new chapbook YOUR POSTHUMOUS DRESS: REMNANTS FROM THE ALEXANDER MCQUEEN COLLECTION (CIRCA 1992-20XX) debuted from dancing girl press (www.dancinggirlpress.com) along with several other fierce books by women populating a vast and amazing catalog. Don't hesitate to check them out and to purchase books by authors such as annette c. boehm, Sarah Chavez, and Atlanta's Jenny Sadre-Orafai! My thanks to remarkable editor Kristy Bowen for publishing crazy good chaps. And special thanks to local artist Jeanie Tomanek for permission to use her beautiful print "Caretaker" as the cover image. You can find more of her work here at Gray House Studios.
However.... If you happen to be in Atlanta, or near Atlanta...don't buy YPD yet. Because in November, you'll see these poems come to life in a reading & show, inspired by McQueen's designs, just like the book.
These poems--written at the extremity of 2016--when personal and political cataclysms just wouldn't quit--for me, watching addiction ruin my family, followed by a divorce & dislocation. For the nation, the presidential election of a narcissist and the horrifying fall-out that still continues.
Whether I find my obsessions or they find me, that year Alexander McQueen, the artist and visionary designer who killed himself in 2010, attracted me like a bellwether. His designs and his shows provoked & defiled. They illuminated our materialism, our superficiality, our sicknesses (see especially VOSS 2001, and The Horn of Plenty)
They were spectacles because McQueen's art encompassed the past & present & looked into a future that finally, he could no longer tolerate. Here are some iconic moments from his shows.
Bloody acrylic torsos, yes.... the animal & the human, yes....drawing our attention to gender-normative, abelist & racist assumptions of beauty...yes.
Many thanks to Kelly Boyker, Poetry Editor of Menacing Hedge--an online journal that continues to surprise and challenge,--who took five from the collection of 19 poems--and even nominated one for A Best of the Net.
Poetry, for me, is visceral--is the thing expressed--and the thing thinged--like McQueen's designs, poetry--like all art-- is a revolt. Yet even when difficult, poetry--one hopes-- shows us the way to healing.
So l want these poems to begin the healing. The show will benefit SHATTERPROOF, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending the devastation addiction causes families. Alexander McQueen's addiction to opioids, many say, is what killed him, and addiction continues to devastate our communities. The price of entry is the price of the book ($5) and all funds will go to the organization. There will be gorgeous fascinators up for auction by hat artist Bitsy Pitts...& body-positive readers & models....
UPDATES on date & location to come...You won't be disappointed...