DIANA HAMILTON SPECIAL
$ 20.00 $ 30.00
This set includes the 2014 chapbook Universe and the full-length title God Was Right (2018) by Diana Hamilton.
More information about each title:
Universe is a long poem about exemplarity. Here, for example, hair-cutting, the wearing of hats, and soviet bacilli stand in for questions about consent, social conventions, and racism. Taking these substitutions largely from texts on moral philosophy, the poem rewrites them in and out of their original contexts. In this new, all-the-more exemplary world of pushing and shoving, someone has wronged someone. But who? The revenge is combinatory, and the lines are short.
* * *
If you stop me
from cutting
your hair,
there is a sense
in which
you are interfering.
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God Was Right collects poems that take the form of arguments, essays, and letters. The title poem argues that God was right to make us love cats (and then watch them die); another categorizes the way women like to be kissed; one proposes a sex ed that takes into account persuasion and pleasure; another argues men should write bad poetry; a letter tries to make friendship about love; a five-paragraph essay tries to disarm heartbreak via analysis; etc. These poems/essays are hyperbolic attempts to write something adequate to a feeling.
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God wanted me to become the immortal protagonist of de Beauvoir’s All Men are Mortal, the title of which suggests that said protagonist must have been misgendered:
women live forever, in order to see that there is no point in love, or in cats.
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