Full Description
Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind-down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.
In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body's prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.
Contents
To the hawk that circled J. Hood Park
I am Not Dead, I'm Dormant
Your journey continues
Search the Distance
Gates Open
Once,
Itemization - Part I
Itemization - Part II
Nurse
To the dreams that made me search
To Raise You, Daughter
Miriam
Self Portrait at 36 w/ David
To the period still arriving & marking the whole of me
To 3:47am when your youngest throws up in her bed
None of it for granted
Picture This
Watching love
Miriam Dawson Hagan
A braid of time
High Proof
Same
To the breasts when it's over
What We Do Now
As if overnight
Tell me all the things you'd miss
To the sleeping woman in Cindy's bakery on the corner of Saint Nicholas & 179th St.
Soaked Mourning
To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming
To the condom on 167th street sprawled between Findlay & College Avenue
To the woman falling to sleep beside me
Express to Work
To the broken mattress on Park Avenue & 167th in the Bronx
To the shark fin on the bullet train from Sendai to Tokyo
Shelter
Meditative State | Safety
To Esmerely, at Claire's who tells my daughters it won't hurt
Tell me all the things you'd miss
To bouquet & bloom
Allow Me
The Meditation
Directions for that swim you know you want to take
Rainey
To the rubber band holding my jeans together
Tonight, ovulation reigns
On hearing that a pussy smells like fish in middle school
Carried Away
To both girls dipping bread in bowls of savory black beans in the Condesa
Advice to myself after my mammogram & yearly doctor visit
What Warms You Most
When My Father Calls
What I Will to Remember
Tonight
Today You are Kite
Lady in the streets, but a freak in the bed"
Roost
Museum of Sex
How We Make It Through
Each Day
For Miriam
I'm not dead, I'm dormant
What to Do
