distributed by UPNE

These are poems that teeter on the edge of propriety, which are by turns playful, even cocky, and laden with self-doubt. Whether extolling the virtues of ego salad or locating the Louvre "in Paris, / or wherever the Louvre may be now," Celona brings a feline wittiness to the act of writing, which she alludes to with a fervency and frequency that border on neurosis."This poem is only for girls," Celona states with infuriating certainty, daring the reader to challenge her in prose poems that stake out a world where men capriciously cross out their wives and "poetry, too, is bad for you."

These sometimes scatological, often buoyant poems juxtapose squalid fact with incandescent images, certainties around which bafflement and pain become organized, against which the distances between people, between penguins, between words and feelings, between beginning with intention and becoming lost, can be measured.

Endorsements:

“Delirious, cantankerous, these prose poems and lyrics just want to elapse, shedding language in phrasal bursts of spark and ashes and lightning impermissible corridors as they go down. They burn the house of the sentence right to the ground. In their flammable burlesque, these footfalls explode the footlights; these falsies shine.” —Joyelle McSweeney

From the Book:

Sunday Morning Cunt Poem

I wrote a book of contiguous poems then mixed them up so they were out of order. They were poems about my cunt, language, Nature, war, and all of them had a marked sense of drama.

With the cunt poems I could have orgasms during sex. I had long, luxurious hair, which I wrapped around my throat like a scarf. You could say I was "released from my prison." My therapist was no longer busy.

We started a business called Ethical Donuts. It was actually a kind of juice bar where you could go and read poems or listen to someone reading poems. If nobody felt like reading poems we would turn on a tape of someone reading poems, usually one of our friends, but sometimes a big star of poetry. Of course, we sold donuts.

In my dream we were hitchhiking to Iowa City, but later when I looked at myself my cheeks were pink and so were my labia. Like a bird I discovered I had wings. I flew higher and higher, but when I got near the sun the wax melted and I fell into a poem by Auden. It was then that I wrote the poem "The Enormous Cock."

For awhile I hushed. Then I started up again about my cunt. Some said it was a vicious swipe at feminism. Others said it was a vicious feminist swipe. It was the only word I knew.

TINA BROWN CELONA was born in 1974 to an American Foreign Service officer and his Vietnamese wife. She grew up in Tokyo, Paris, Kuala Lumpur, and Washington, DC. She received degrees from Brown University and the Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. Her husband is the poet, Matt Celona. Fence Books published The Real Moon of Poetry and Other Poems in 2002. Magazine publications include Octopus, Shampoo, La Petite Zine and Puppyflowers. Her poems have appeared in Explosive!, Epoch and Fence. She lives in Seattle, WA.

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