Search results for ""Author Kendra DeColo""

Kendra DeColo's award winning debut, Thieves in the Afterlife, explores the ambiguities of sexuality and gender, refusing to settle for easy answers or simple explanations. Whether in a strip club or a prison these poems weave together an array of personae, celebrating the profane while taking apart tropes and cultural signifiers to expose the human pulse underneath. Part battle cry and part striptease, Thieves in the Afterlife targets the culture of commoditization and violence, articulating the pain, joy, and bravery needed to resist categorization in what Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize judge, Yusef Komunyakaa, calls a hardcore reckoning.

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Described by some as "erotica for feminists," and "enemy to family values," DeColo's poems convulse with desire and a longing for connection. Her work speaks to the particular loneliness of watching Fox News after you've masturbated too many times, depleted and filled with fascination and terror. Balancing tenderness with ferocity, cynicism with wonder, DeColo's poems disrupt and reclaim misogynistic language, creating a lyricism that dazzles and swoons, hoping to leave a stain deep enough to last. "The poems in Kendra DeColo's extraordinary second collection, My Dinner With Ron Jeremy, live in the sinuous space between want and propriety, fantasy and the 'Must Be 18' button on the poetry portal. There's love here, too, and John Coltrane, and abandonment in all its necessary circumstances, but sex is both brilliant talisman and vacant harbinger through it all. This often humorous, always provocative book puts a neon backlight on the filaments between what we have, what we have to do, and what we wish we could do, whether we can rewind and watch it again or not. "--Adrian Matejka, Author of The Big Smoke, a 2014 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. "Marvelous poetry ...poems that would make great feature films. "--Ron Jeremy, Actor "Sex-positive feminist verse...DeColo manages to coax beauty and meaning from the absurd aching morass of human existence. It's not every writer who can emerge from these corners with anything approaching grace, much less deft and bracing poems such as these."--The Nashville Scene "[DeColo's] work is ferocious and tender, demolishing patriarchal language and using the fragments to build riotous new worlds."--Bitch Magazine

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The Southern Review of Books's "Best Southern Books of April 2021" Punk-rock feminist poems exploring motherhood, pop culture, and resistance with a spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy Kendra DeColo reaffirms the action of mothering as heroic, brutal, and hardcore. These poems interrogate patriarchal narratives about childbirth, postpartum healing, and motherhood through the lens of pop culture and the political zeitgeist. With references ranging from Courtney Love to Lana Del Rey to Richard Burton to Nicolas Cage, I Am Not Trying to Hide My Hungers from the World revitalizes the way we look at mothering: pushing its boundaries and reclaiming one's spirit of defiance, abundance, and irreverent joy.

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