Sex Depression Animals: Poems

"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?"

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

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

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.

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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

V
Recipe for Quiet Ferocity Show More