Virginals

Poetry. Szporluk has often been read and praised as a visionary surrealist, but her body of work, evinced by VIRGINALS, shows her also as a powerful dramatist, enacting scenes rooted in very real moments of tension and danger. These shocking stanzas lay bare their speakers' violent psyches, and take poet and reader to new, honest spaces cleared of niceties and decorum. In sequences of poems, Szporluk acknowledges and explores the dissonance of art and love, in narrow, unruly lines that are disarmingly direct, except the direction is towards a kind of madness. It's a relentless and overwhelming lyricism, persuasive and unforgettable.--Ed Skoog