Written in Oakland, New Mexico and Berlin, Detonated Mirror is the latest collection of poetry from Sara Larsen, author of of The Riot Grrrl Thing (Roof Books), Merry Hell (Atelos Press), and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous (Printing Press).
DETONATED MIRROR is a collection of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest: a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, yet at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. It is a place of aliens, the atom bomb, scorching sunlight and rough, bony terrain: a place where conspiracies, warfare, and the story of humans, animals and the earth collide in extraordinary ways. The poems explore in a visionary context the explosive and prismatic slippages on the perceived borders of self, lover, land, animal, and consciousness. Sparse, rhythmic pieces share space with prose poems that explore the narrator's "secret body". These, in turn, share space with horror-disorderly-anarchistic poems, which buck at the underside of lyricism and playfulness with unhinged rage and obsessions with the grotesque inner and outer aspects of the body and its sex and sexuality. Ultimately, these rich and roving poems are grounded in paradox and sublimity, and in the often magical, ultra-sensory encounters between bodies, beings, and landscape.
Excerpt from DETONATED MIRROR:
It is my secret body who gilds me luminously as I turn through states, who sends bulls into the absurd epiphany roads, who buries branchlike pee into lace forest grounds and florals my boots and thongs with urine. It is my secret body who stores water wells in the trunk. In endless circles, I am mistress to the governance of the horned owl and bowls of smoking burnt up wooded cauldrons. As I drive on, my humiliations become quite pitiless and brutal, as if a spell has enjambed me. At once, I see I am now missing my torso, and another time I see that it has returned. And yet at another turn, my fingers mist over and my palms appear to guide the wheel. When my larynx is present, I cling to beating song.
My secret body watches me and moves me and shocks me and holds me, covers me in blackness, in blankets. I shift in its undulations--what else could I do?
Poetry. Nature. Family & Relationships. Women's Studies.
