Horrible Dance

by Avery Lake

Overview

A brilliant poetic debut about gender-based violence that dismantles received definitions of both gender and violence, Horrible Dance is an accomplished addition to transfeminist thought and theory.

By turns darkly comic, emotionally connected, playful, incisive, lyrical and irreverent, Lake’s poems navigate a harrowing personal and political terrain with understated, expansive wisdom. Lake persistently returns us to the search for love that lies at the core of relational trauma, even as she shows us how catastrophically such a search can be derailed.

This is a rare text able to hold the full velocity of a survivor’s hurt and rage alongside a clear-eyed understanding of the extent and complexity of harm. In their honest accounting of a wide array of bad encounters, these poems point us, again, toward compassion, tenderness, and solidarity.

can you forgive me
for how you hurt me so bad
—“On Shame”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781771315760
Publisher:	Brick Books
Publication date:	04/30/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	72
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Avery Lake is a worker and writer living in occupied Tiohtià:ke. She attended Concordia University and is not in the scene.

Table of Contents

Act I The Home

Outdoor Cat 11

Pre-Transition House Party Disaster 12

Parts of Men's Bodies That Tell Their Confessions and Horrors 16

On Womanhood 18

Disposability Blues 25

Bruise (v.): to continue through the river, even as He grows heavier 26

Family/History 27

Act II The Other

On Shame 33

Night at the Sexual Assault Centre Art Show 34

Reasons Not to Get Married 36

A Pearl 37

Reposition I Burn Something 38

Reposition II WHAT MASK 39

The purest breakup poem is the bit in the lighthouse when robert pattinson makes willem dafoe his pup & then immediately kills him & then Dies 40

Greenhouse 42

Sonnet Under Ice 44

Act III The Relations of Production

Pop Quiz 46

Color Study: Unemployed 48

Color Study: Desk v. Window 49

Sonnet for the Boss's Son 50

Color Study: Full-Time 51

Color Study: Crying@Work 52

Suicide in Translation 54

How to Live Alone 56

Houses and People 57

Grief Sestina 59

Bruise (n.): an inability to sleep 61

Color Study: Horrible Dance 62

Good Advice from an Undiscovered Atom 65

Notes 67

Acknowledgments 71

Editorial Reviews

"Come for the razor wit and sly commentary, stay for the intense emotional acuity and mastery of form. Lake transitions effortlessly from subtle meditations on trauma and transition to searing indictments of disposability and abuse culture." — Kai Cheng Thom, author of I Hope We Choose Love and Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars

"These poems are beautiful, pointed, ferociously sad, and at just the right times also bang-on funny. They're a deep look at recovery, trauma, transness, and healing, and what is and isn't possible." — Casey Plett, author of A Safe Girl to Love, Little Fish, and A Dream of a Woman

"The poems in Horrible Dance offer deft witness and lament with a wryly arched brow, and a tender heart, well bruised, still beating." — Trish Salah, author of Wanting in Arabic and Lyric Sexology Vol. 1

"Lake's palimpsest of genders past and future is curious, strange, preoccupied, and lovely." — Davey Davis, author of the earthquake room

From the Publisher