succubus in my pocket, by kari edwards

 

succubus_coverfinal_image

EOAGH Books, 2015
Poetry / Trans Genre / Transgender Studies
ISBN 978-1-4951-8614-1

Winner, Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry, 2016

Foreword by Trace Peterson
Introduction by Rob Halpern

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kari edwards’ succubus in my pocket is a masterwork against mastering, a tarrying recursive, fretting over how to write from life when life is so relentlessly displaced by its commodity form, a palinode to identity from its extimite extrusions, sloughing on and off simulacra, flaying the skim off “events,” relooping seriality and tracing narrative’s affective ruses and too predictable disappointments. Talking to the taxman and the war machine and sex gender and the symbolic about poetry while turning a trick or laying down to hallucinate a line of flight rather than consolidate a happy story we might now call homonormativity or neoliberalism or white supremacy, succubus is a most delicate and pissed and sad inhabitation of the available options and of their exorbitantly vital refusal.

— Trish Salah

Hurtling through icons of patriarchal pin-up heroes and institutions – the narrator in edwards’ apocalypse sends up every dick and striver in hir path. This is survival on the edge of suicide, a dystopian send-up of massive proportions. edwards’ reality is comic, biting and tragic, filled with vengeful goddesses, where the only stable ground is a no-holds-barred anger and a survivor’s persistence. Hope lies in an insistent polyphony that rises above the violent linear world of bureaucracies and binaries trying to insert themselves into every orifice. This is no easy romp – it is a battle, a grinder, ultimately an explosion where the limitless prevails.

— Samuel Ace

At night after reading kari edwards there are giants walking through my sleep and I wake to width and height dysphoria where there is no doubt that the very best poets end our romance with the proportional world. An alert fluency cracks our reading glasses, this is the point edwards informs us, “—your amount has automatically been deducted from your slavery . . . this message has been brought to you by coke . . . the drink the world loves . . . have a coke on us . . bzzzzzzzzz” It is not a cynical world but a sad confused one, and this incredibly insightful soul gave us some of the finest writing to keep on proving it.

— CAConrad

 

Reviews of this Title:

“10 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss,” Literary Hub, Dec 2017.

“Identity, Praxis, and kari edwards’ Trans Poetics,” University of Arizona Poetry Center Blog, April 2017.

Simone Wolff, “Review: Trans poet’s book succubus in my pocket,” Ladyclever. Oct 2016.

28th Annual Lammy Award Winners Announced, Lambda Literary, June 7, 2016

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