Negative Money
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the New England Book Award
From a National Book Award nominated poet, this collection is about a life lived in the red, on the edges of great lack and great abundance, of financial and emotional margins
Negative Money follows a speaker continually coming of age while probing the binary thresholds of racial and gender identity, violence and safety, security and precarity, love and loneliness.
For readers of Readers Claudia Rankine, Torrey Peters, Ocean Vuong, and Jericho Brown, NBA nominated Lillian-Yvonne Bertrams’s poems are innovative, conceptually thoughtful work. Through experimentation and muscular lyricism, Bertram maintains a style that observes a speaker’s attempt to understand and exert multiple identities within the binary confines of race and gender.
Playing and gliding from acrostics to sonnets to maps, these compassionate, cerebral, and irreverent poems plainly recognize the larger and potentially escapable oppressive systems that dominate all of our lives by narrating the exhaustion that comes from living under constraining systems of relentless extraction, systems whose powers fracture all attempts at genuine love and intimacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bertram (Travesty Generator) blends irreverence, honesty, and formal play in poems that bear witness to the precarity of living on the margins of society. One poem begins, "My eyes are now wide open/ to our moment's desperate light," speaking to Bertram's greater project of leaving the reader with an increased awareness of the fragility, absurdity, and loneliness of the world. Bertram's writing is filled with moments of blunt reckoning, as in one poem that offers the brief but echoing recognition that "America is expensive." In another, they write: "It's tricky work saving white people from themselves." Throughout, the understanding that "we are poor in every corner/ of the world" challenges and complicates the role of language as it dissects a collective reality through individual experience. "The other side of the future world," Bertram warns, "is/ just another future this." This profound book will stir readers into necessary reflection.
