Empty Clip
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
The poems of Empty Clip bore into the cultures of violence in the United States while candidly cross-firing upon the poets' complicity and testifying on these cultures' effects upon female body image and mental health. From a meditation about a bullet hole-animated PowerPoint presentation on campus shooters to the startled invective against an unprovoked dick pic, lyrics brooding upon illness-driven suicidal thoughts to narratives about a slippery memory of childhood abuse, Emilia Phillips's third poetry collection sears with the "angry love" of self, in order to find some truth that's nevertheless "a broken bone that can't be set."
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Phillips (Groundspeed) responds to violence with an unyielding sonic lyricism and filmic narrative images that are both highly personal and mediated. The poems reflect on American gun culture and related violence, as well as the poet's personal intersections with these landscapes. In "Hollow Point," a memory of a pet's death frames an inhumane world by removing the border between human and animal: "the way the dog's head opened/ like laughter/ into grief, the hollow points/ screaming skull and brain/ into the dining room wall." These poems find some comfort in the inherent value of fellow humans, however uncomfortably close they may be. "We will never forgive one another/ for being human, which is a part of what makes us/ human," Phillips writes in the hilarious "On Receipt of a Dick Pic." Her poems approach difficult material with suitably deadpan humor and dazzle when disrupting institutional messaging, seen in such titles as "The CIA Live-Tweets the Assassination of Usama Bin Ladin Five Years Later" and "Campus Shooter Powerpoint and Information Session." Phillips uses repetition and juxtaposition to press for further conversation on American gun violence and what it means to live through it: "because repetition// makes muscle// makes muscle/ memory// of violence// the dead make us// alive or so// we tell them."
