Dragstripping
Poems
Published on 3. September 2024
111 pages
978-0-8229-9165-6 (ISBN)
Description
Dragstripping, Jan Beatty's seventh collection of poems, takes readers to the literal dragstrip, the metaphorical dragstrip of the body, and the strip club, where the ecstatic is rescripted and where women disappear and reappear in the crosscut of gender. Transgressing into and out of poetic form, Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech, mixing the real and unreal, and finding elation in a strange and shifting land.
More details
Person
Jan Beatty is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently The Body Wars and Jackknife: New and Selected Poems, which won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Her memoir, American Bastard, won the Red Hen Nonfiction Prize. Beatty has worked as a waitress, in abortion clinics, and in maximum-security prisons and is professor emerita at Carlow University, where she directed the MFA and creative writing programs and the Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.
Content
- Cover
- Contents
- 1 Sanctified
- The Body's River
- The Emptying
- 2 Drag
- Dragstripping
- Junkie
- When Rape Was an Ocean
- The Drawbridge
- The Stripping Tools
- 3 I Ran into Water
- Blues Shouter
- My Father Flying
- Blood Ring
- Psych Intake w/ Flames
- What He Said
- Lowrider
- Leaving Iowa City
- The Earthmovers
- 4 starling
- Spoonful
- Green Comets of Future
- Outlaw Dead
- If You Slice the Moon
- My Father's Bandages
- Sky Door
- a man leaves his post & his body takes over
- 5 snaking
- California
- Sky Dog
- Father, Blue Room
- Dream Letters
- 3 babies driving, zig-zaggy
- 6 Those Night Roads, Wyoming
- To the Woman at the Laramie Airport
- Half-Sun over Powder River
- Thunder Bay
- Scarline
- Road to Ketchikan, 1987
- 7 Drag Strips
- When I Was Holy
- The Made: Train
- Leaving Santa Fe
- Dream Highway: Quarantine
- The Jailer
- Miraculous
- the river of light is all we have
- Notes
- Acknowledgments
