Bad Bad moves the unabashedly juvenile persona elliptically constructed in Zirconia into a seriously amusing, un - blushing womanhood. The poems are equally clownish and fuck-offish, taking on with equivocal weightlessness the lexicons and trimmings of fashion, as it applies to the Self and the garments that clothe the Self, and self-obliteration, as experienced through immersion in the delights and disgust of the Other. “come on the revulsion//the revulsion//// when ////you bring it home////like seafoam//when you bring it home.... ,” she writes, in an ecstasy of encounter. Minnis addresses the inner needs of the poet—“the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist”—and is everywhere concerned with the denotation of that which is true and necessary to the true and necessary poet. “it is a poem//which is a trough////where you can make your reputation////as a stiff///anyway, I am not trying to be human anymore//////I am trying to be smart....in the head....like a pissant.......”
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CHELSEY MINNIS is the author of Zirconia, winner of the 2001 Alberta Prize from Fence Books. She is a graduate of the University of Colorado and the Iowa Writers Workship, and a native of Littleton, Colorado. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado.
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