Along the Diminishing Stretch of Memory / Christie Collins

  dancing girl press, 2014$7.00 These poems rant and laugh and grieve. They question and pull and wink. Wonderfully, above all, they have no use for caution. These audacious, incisive poems explore everything from the gut-punch of loss to a sentient teratoma to what it means to have an accent that “will undo this world.” These poems will grab you by the lapels, and if you’re lucky, they won’t let you go. Christie Collins is an electric new voice in poetry.—Catherine PierceThis debut collection is—as the poet writes—“the lover whose song cannot be cured.” These poems gift us with infectious motion, a restless sense of identity that discovers a regenerative spirit by daring to enact psychic destruction. The elegy’s grievous descent becomes a vehicle toward the creation of a vulnerable and sympathetic voice often in tension with various doubles—a cowboy, a cabana boy, a rag doll, a green bell paper, even (Heaven, help us) a teratoma. The pleasing result is a mythmaking