Zirconia ...................... Bad Bad - Chelsey Minnis

nCollected in this volume are Chelsey Minnis's first two books: Zirconia (winner of the Alberta Prize) and Bad Bad. Zirconia introduced a speaker described as half-smirking, half-weeping by the Village Voice. Minnis heralded the gurlesque, a term coined for the occasion and defined as a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy.

Bad Bad ushers Zirconia's juvenile persona into unblushing 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. Minnis addresses the inner needs of the poet--the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist.