"This bewitching debut delivers everything the title promises and more." --Electric Literature
In SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity--one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, "What's the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil's image?"
Product Details
ISBN-13: 9780814258613
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication Date: 03-13-2023
Pages: 84
Product Dimensions: 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)
Series: Journal Cbwheeler Poetry Prize
About the Author
Mag Gabbert has received a Discovery Award from 92NY's Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review Daily, Pleiades, Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Methodist University.
Read an Excerpt
Read an Excerpt
David after Michelangelo
I was struck by your hands- the right one, in particular- so massive against your neat thigh. And your posture, half tense and half slack. Tracing your gaze, I think you must be looking for someone, or dreaming of the impossibly long sinews of your enemies, plucked and strung across the open mouths of lyres.
I am consumed by violent stillness-
that you do not reach for me. That you are not that kind of man, but could have been a wide, cool platform to lie down on, an empty plate for me to lick, tracing the veined marble with my tongue.
Anniversary
There's a moment in the videotape, after the president has been shot, when Jackie crawls onto the trunk of the car. She moves back toward the asphalt five hundred yards before, the reality that existed six seconds ago. She's grabbing at something- a piece of his skull or brain matter. Grief, without context. We scramble for the tools to build it a container. It changes shape and color. It moves at us in waves- the car, the gun, the brain. It's settling in. It's eroding the shore we're standing on. The asphalt slips behind and behind. The present keeps arriving.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
I Steam Ship Lake Wedding David Blue Toilet Gun Lace Bathtub Constellation Gum Pink
II Crack Sleep Dark Matter Tattoo Anniversary Bone Death Baby Figment Trick Fever June America Ghost
III The Breakup
IV Rat Oyster Pigeon Egg Cat Bee Girl Bat Rabbit Rhinoceros Dolphin Orangutan Goat