Poetry. "Kristy Bowen's sparkling and spellbinding poems are full of the things of households and Victorian interiors: corsets, envelopes, books, hooks, and spoons. Bowen's vigilant attention to the danger and fragility of these environments is manifest in her description of the beings (women, girls, and birds) who inhabit or are bought into these spaces. These are the muses of Bowen's museum ('a seat or shrine of the muses'). Like a careful curator, Bowen gathers and assembles stories, scenes, and objects related to her subjects. The result is a densely packed cabinet of gothic wonders and haunting relics. Reading these poems makes one keenly aware of the inticacies, intimacies, and inconsistencies staged in the theaters of domestic spaces"--Michelle Detorie. "Kristy Bowen's poems are sexy and smart. The poems in IN THE BIRD MUSEUM fool around with dictionaries, notebooks, concordances, and the ways that bodies get lost and found in real and imaginary places. There are dance halls and graveyards here, footnotes and invocations. One poem asserts, 'I suggest everything is a metaphor for sex. Even the bird.' These poems let us know pleasure and danger are often in close proximity. These poems are inhabited by girls and women who move through the world with a sense of urgency, and Bowen invites us to join them. Or rather, she INSISTS we do. This book is delicious"--Susan Denning.

in the bird museum

Literature & Fiction

Bowen, Kristy

Poetry

Dusie

This collection of poetry from artist/poet Kristy Bowen juxtaposes experience, sexuality, love, and memory. The poems are small and exquisite windows that show glimpses of the psyche.

The Fever Almanac

Ghost Road Pub Group Inc

Poetry. Women's Studies. "Kristy Bowen is a master of conjuring the treacheries of femininity. In SEX & VIOLENCE, she draws upon such diverse sources as Plath's Ariel poems (here collaged piece by piece to make her own poems so much stranger, and newer, and hauntingly 'eerie,' as in the absence of the missing, familiar words, and the missing, familiar woman) and, to conjure the contrary, poems set to dumb blonde jokes, where the result of two blondes 'fall(ing) down a hole' is that 'the wishbone of their throats harbor tiny fish and assorted birdery' and that, after murder, their bodies can be found 'placed so careful in their beds each morning.' Here is a book to beware of, dear reader. You'll find yourself trapped inside Bowen's 'enormous wedding cake--a claustrophobic swirl of sugar and lace,' with 'Horses and house fires' placed right next to it, and in its feverish dream of kisses and ruin, you won't want to ever escape."--Gillian Cummings "Bowen is a poet on fire the way that Dali's giraffes are on fire, the way our overheated Earth is on fire, the way Sylvia Plath was on fire the year before her suicide. Her poems happen in a time when 'men continue to do terrible things to women,' and yet women are poets with magical and persistent powers. '[E]ach night I am remaking something with the thrum of a hundred thousand wings,' she writes. 'I am waiting with a screwdriver behind the wardrobe's mirrored doors... waiting for the bite.' Her blondes turn their dumbness into blunt instruments. Her dead girls pen letters to their murderers: 'You know us writers, turning everything to grist... ' This is a not-to-miss book, even for the jaded. In a time when 'everyone [is] drinking tea and going on and on about art,' Bowen wrestles her tight-edged poems into new startle."--Devon Balwit "Kristy Bowens SEX & VIOLENCE with its attention-getting title delves through body, self, woman, with knife-sharp darkly humorous phrasing and opulent imagery that has become her trademark. Bowen uses a palette of ekphrasis (Salvador Dali's 'Inventions of the Monsters'), allusion to pop tropes and slasher movies, and anaphora (a blonde... ) to deliver her inimitable and startling exposition of love against its backdrop of brutality. She repeats haunting lines, 'I love it like history,' populates her poems with magical images in ironic settings: little blue dog, honey drudgers, a huge camellia. Bowen presents a dichotomy that balances the lustful body and its corporeal yearning with the ethereal, spiritual agape love. 'How I would like to believe in tenderness.' Then: 'I do not know how to write about love without a little bit of pain' she says in 'how to write a love poem in a time of war.' Bowen's latest book of poetry etches itself in the reader at a cellular level."--Cathryn Shea

sex & violence

Literary

Black Lawrence Press

Poetry. Set in the 1930's midwest and adrift in the surreal world of bird girls and sideshow mermaids, GIRL SHOW explores the boundaries between spectacle and domesticity, between beauty and grotesquerie. Each poem inhabits the strangeness at the edges of the commonplace, where the real word falls away to the whirl of carnival lights and tented shadows.  "Kristy Bowen's poems unfold like a fairy tale pop-up book; open like a cabinet of wonders in which girl is both cabinet and wonder; flame and spark into the night air where we read by that light. In a collection so rich in image—milk and angels and vinegar, the trap door and the hemline, bees and a line of low clouds—I'm struck even more by those seemingly small words of relationship—the prepositions—behind, against, inside, beneath beneath beneath. These poems arise from the 'rubied dark' where the Louises and Livvies and Coras live, frightened and yet defiant, and return there, with us in tow."—Mary Ann Samyn "The poems in Kristy Bowen's brilliantly musical GIRL SHOW capture the details of domestic life gone delicately, mysteriously wrong: 'My salt shakers shaped like ducks. My ducks shaped like / killers.' In this map of bruised doors and broken windows, house after house reveals burnt staircases and ghostly inhabitants. The girls displayed in these illuminated rooms 'speak softly while night ... knocks us out, / knocks us up.' These gorgeous lyrics document dangerous histories, the marginalia that matters most. Bowen's dreamy, eerie poems create a subversively gothic landscape: 'mile after mile of busted / lunchboxes glinting in the sun.'"—Carol Guess

Girl Show

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bowen, Kristy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Bowen, Kristy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Bowen, Kristy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

in the bird museum

The Fever Almanac

sex & violence

Girl Show