The Book of Repulsive Women: Five Increasing / Rhythms

Carrie Lorig

In the first incarnation of The Book of Repulsive Women, Djuna Barnes writes “[Her lips] bloom vivid and repulsive / As the truth.” 101 years later, Carrie Lorig has usurped Barnes’s title to expose the contemporary repulsive woman: she is a thinker, a feeler, a poet. She is intellectual emotion, relentlessly inquisitive and just plain brutal. She exclaims, “All reading is blood,” and the literature she reads is “So Polluted.” This text is blood, polluted with punctuation and form and accusative words that may as well be curses. And we are all accountable. Harkening to Barnes, Lorig declares “There is a Devil inside me / There is a Flower inside me,” and so we watch them both bloom and wilt and decay. We twist our faces in disgust at revelation; we squint against all that beauty.

“As soon as there is motion / a poem / As soon as there is art, the pretentious scrap / the pretentious corpse / the female occupant / the repulsive jewel you pay attention to torn and sore / She has no choice / She has no choice

when she reads.

 

All reading is blood.

 

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“Fuck you, I’m real.” –Emily Brontë”

CARRIE LORIG is the author of The Pulp Vs. The Throne, a book of poems and essays. Chapbooks include Reading as a Wild ower Activist (H_NGM_N), NODS. (Magic Helicopter), stonepoems (with Sara Woods, by Solar Luxuriance), and Labor Day (with Nick Sturm, by Forklift, Ohio).