Wrong Feast

"Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream-meets another—this is the landscape where these poems unfold," Kathryn Nuernberger writes of Rivka Clifton's, Wrong Feast. Indeed, in Cliftons’ second full-length collection, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry engaging Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.” Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny — a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head is deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone is birthed into a crib . . . Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention, while fully considering the ambiguities and the possibilities within Clifton’s creations. These are not merely poems of action and consequence, but ones of call and response. They will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails. They are the entrails.

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