The End of Pink

by Kathryn Nuernberger

Overview

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters—Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin—all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and—of course—joy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683155
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/19/2016
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	471 KB

About the Author

Kathryn Nuernberger has been a farmer’s wife tied to the land, but now she is a confirmed vagabond. She has lived in various corners of Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana, and likes the mountains best. Her first book, Rag&Bone (Elixir Press, 2011), was a love letter to backwoods junk collectors and all of the abandoned cabins in the foothills to the Ozark Mountains. An unapologetic dilettante, she has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and The Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life to research unlikely aspects of the history of science and medicine. She currently lives in Columbia, MO, teaches creative writing at the University of Central Missouri, and serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Table of Contents

The Symbolical Head as When Was the Last Time?…7
More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769) …. 9
Zoontological Sublime … 12
About Derrida, If You’re into That …. 16
Bat Boy Washed Up on Shore …. 19
Benjamin Harding to Prospective Investors on the Refining Effects of Static Electricity and Volcanic Action in the Ultimate Production of Both Atomic (or Molecular) and FREE Pure Metallic Gold (1838) … 21
Testimonial (1888)…. 23
P. T. Barnum’s Figi Mermaid Exhibition as I Was Not the Girl I Think I Was …. 25
I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point … 27
Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magentism Displayed (1791) as What I Want Is … 29
Rituals of the Bacabs as the Strange Case of Kate Abbott … 31
Birds of Ohio …. 33
Reading Drops of Water: Showing the Mysteries of the Visible World (1873)
as Love Poem … 34
The Book of Knowledge, the Experienced Farrier, &c. (1793) as The Best of
All Possible Worlds … 36
The End of Pink … 38
~
The Saint Girl’s Sweetest Tortures… 40
The Saint Girl Died and Went to Heaven and That Was One Problem After Another … 41
Ways In Which the Saint Girl Is and Is Not Me; Also So What If She Is and What If She Isn’t … 42
The Saint Girl Discovers an Orgasmitron … 44
The Saint Girl Tries to Do the Right Thing … 45
The Saint Girl’s Isochronal Error … 46
The Saint Girl Takes in Strays … 47
The Saint Girl Opens the Window and Closes It as She Pleases … 48
The Nimbuses of Devils … 49
~
Or Perhaps Not … 51
My First Peacock … 52
Property Lines … 53
When Cortez Came …. 55
Little Brown Jug, Look on the Bright Side …. 56
My Peacock among the Phantasmagoria … 57
Whatever You Need … 60
Toad … 62
My Peacock’s Daguerrotype … 64
Peter, Raised by Wolves (1726) … 67
Rene Descartes and the Clockwork Girl … 70
Peacock and Sister …. 73
Little Lesson on How to Be … 74

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award

“The remarkable designs of a landscape created by Kathryn Nuernberger give us such a stamp of hoof, wonder, and wit—so much wisdom and understanding of what it means to truly fling your body into the world. This is an unforgettable collection of sly-sexy poems of desire, grief, and motherhood, finally offering up the ‘truth of it, the refracted light and blooming anemones of it, the red / coral and unfurling starfish of it.’ But perhaps the greatest gift from The End of Pink is the insistence of ‘how very emerald joy is, how very leafed with lapis and gilding’—a passionate aide-mémoire to hold off a surrender to the dark.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“I love the ways in which The End of Pink confronts the idea of wisdom, and deftly deconstructs it. When is fable and myth more accurate than science? When does graybearded public authority submit to the wisdom of messy, private experience? How does the wisdom of the book measure up against the wisdom of the body—the female body especially? What do we do when our everyday language fails to represent reality? Poetry, of course, is the answer to this last question, and it is the poetry of Kathryn Nuernberger in particular that makes a place for us in our uncertainty. Not a safe place, not a place of comfort, but a place of surreal, dark beauty that knows us all the same.”

—Nicky Beer

"This a collection of extraordinary resolve, a book that works through emotional turmoil with a steadfast earnestness that resists privatizing pain at the same time it refuses to make something clever or ostentatious with it. The result is a refreshing innovation on the confessional that reads as easily as a conversation with a friend over a drink while still surprising us with new connections, illuminations, and affecting enactments of psychological healing."

— NewPages

From the Publisher