Aesthesia Balderdash

Aesthesia Balderdash is the first, full-length book of poems by Kim Vodicka. The poems both mock and exalt femininity and feminine "types" (valley girls, housewives, mothers, prima donnas, virgins, debutantes, celebutantes, hookers, black widows, murderesses, gender queers, drag queens, trannies, bitches of the male persuasion, etc.), French braiding sound play, pun, and sense(lessness) into siren songs that are sometimes screamed, or shouted, or sung sweetly, or whispered. These moody, PMSy, moon-maddened poems, trannies and tyrannies as they are, may be lusty, intoxicating, hypnotic, sentimental, and/or nauseating. The text is drunk most of the time on seduction and repulsion. It satirizes the American girl's desire to be an elle--a woman worthy of the belles and whistles of the French féminin suffixes (-ette, -euse, -enne). In short, Aesthesia Balderdash is "whispery, pink-packaged poésie signed by Elizabeth Arden and sealed with an adulteress."