Kirjahaku

"Flower Conroy's exquisite language is like a fierce storm, a tasty bite of forbidden fruit (which, we learn, and instantly believe, might have been quince...). Seduction, in her skilled hands, is adventure, is danger, sports colorful red lips, fuchsia shoes. To read Flower Conroy is to be taken apart, sliced open, seared with lightning."-Laura Foley, author of Joy Street and The Glass Tree "In The Awful Suicidal Swans, even the weather transmits damage or indifference; lightning cracks like a ribcage; the cold closes in. These are not comforting poems and clearly, Flower Conroy does not mean them to be. They should come with the warning read at your own risk, though you should take the chance. There is both rage and remarkably beautiful language within these dark verses that will leave the reader with a new perspective on the power of poetry itself."-Eleanor Lerman, author of Strange Life and The Sensual World Re-Emerges "Fashioning imagery from the gorgeous to the gritty, Flower Conroy conjures moments of lust, love, and life with power and passion. Like the tattoos that crop up now and again in these lines, her poems leave an indelible mark on the mind."-Leila J. Rupp, author of Sapphistries: A Global History of Love Between Women "These formally immaculate, sonically rich poems overflow with grit and perfume-with patent leather and Redwoods, laundromats and apple clover, Lucky Strikes and overripe eggplant. The abstract becomes tangible, tasteable, and the enormous turns microscopic as Conroy explores the wildness of the erotic. With stormy, charged language and a disarming directness, the poems ask, again and again, How alive are you? In this extraordinary chapbook, Conroy shows us how to be more alive, more animal, and more human." -Alyse Knorr, author of Annotated Glass "Flower Conroy is like Marianne Moore punch-drunk in love with a pole dancer. Each poem in this book pays gorgeous attention to sound as it careens after the body through bars, blizzards, and memories. The Awful Suicidal Swans is a 'Kiss, apocalypse' that will leave you breathless."-Rita Mae Reese, author of The Alphabet Conspiracy

Here is a collection whose reach is insatiable. With a gymnastic flow that both utilizes and interrogates language, Conroy navigates loss and grief, love and memory, longing and frustration. The syntax is dizzying, the digressions erudite, and yet it all points to self-interrogation. In these poems, the dead are not dead, time suspends at the corner of the page, and nature intrudes relentlessly in a busy parlor of images. Whether it is champagne flowering from its bottle or "a bouquet of birds emerging from a snake's unhinged jaw," the motion of these poems is sudden, eruptive, and impossible to forget.