Luxury, Blue Lace
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Often, the fact of being an individual can seem wildly at odds with the experience of containing multitudes. In Luxury, Blue Lace, S. Brook Corfman takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain. Corfman’s poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge. Luxury, Blue Lace was the winner of the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize in 2018.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Relying on abstraction and the unspoken, Corfman shapes a story of unique gender experience and transformation in this extraordinary debut. The collection was chosen by Richard Siken for the Autumn House Rising Writer Prize, which is notable because Corfman sews something delicate from a similarly dreamlike fabric of longing that Siken's Crush embodies: "There is the imaginary twin (blue) and the real twin (red), as if we can know beforehand the distinction.// We shared a face. We both tried to hide. Each named slant for a patriarch.// Dysphoria of many kinds, but some more striking than others." Corfman crafts the poems by talking through family, domesticity, dolls, and childhood baubles. While references to transmutation, of seeking alternative embodiment, are semiobscured, the narrator elucidates via a complex juncture of both acquiescence and resistance. "There are many rooms and you suffer most when you go between them. A tendency even in language to uninhabit. But now, we know there are rooms. We know it is the going from one to the other that takes it out of you." Like Seurat's painting A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, which Corfman references, readers may easily lose themselves in these poems' own form of pointilism. Corfman writes from carefully detailed liminal spaces, producing a work of rare beauty and thoughtfulness.
