Cover Art: Exit Deer, Cover & Interior Design: Alban Fischer
40 pages
December 2013, ISBN 978-1-936919-24-6
TRY VIOLENCE
The cord around a lover’s wrist
tells her to remember. The red passion, the braid
overlap of one body to another. Knot to knot,
mouth to mouth, no one doubts anymore.
She wears it rather than red the wrist otherwise.
She read there was a cord from one dream
to another, that the dreamers might meet
while walking down the twist of thread.
She has worn and worn it down. The memory
reforms from stray fibers. Symbols are easy.
Harder his mouth to her ear, the promise
of further cruelty, how her heart sang
at the mention of her own breakage.
It was one room with poor lighting,
and in it they had some measure
of their shadows. The city around them
took up her cry and echoed it in siren,
a volley of distress. He left a mark
on her wrist. She wears it to remember.
Bad Star by Rebecca Hazelton (Digital)
About Bad Star
Just enough knife, just enough feather—Rebecca Hazelton's Bad Star cuts and caresses with masochistic precision in this brilliant dissection of modern love. I would say to potential readers: take a deep breath and see how far you can go.
—Allison Benis White, author of Self Portrait with Crayon
Bad Star is a gripping, lyrics noir that chronicles the travails of a clear-eyed femme fatale we root for despite, or because of, her love of "small violences / which swoon her silent / and unafraid." Hazelton recasts a tale of star-crossed lovers with a fierce intelligence, a profound exploration of eroticism, and a music so exquisite it carries us through from violence to radiance: "what joy, / to feel opoened up / to wonder ...to have the real / fear at last."
—Katy Didden, author of The Glacier's Wake
About Rebecca Hazelton
Rebecca Hazelton is the author of the chapbook, Bad Star (YesYes Books), Fair Copy (Ohio State University Press, 2012), winner of the 2011 Ohio State University Press / The Journal Award in Poetry, and Vow, from Cleveland State University Press. She was the 2010-11 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin, Madison Creative Writing Institute and winner of the “Discovery” / Boston Review 2012 Poetry Contest. In 2014, she won a Pushcart. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The New Yorker, and Best American Poetry2013 and 2015.
Interviews
Interview with Speaking of Marvels
