The Book of Repulsive Women
Sonnet A
Compromised Paradise / Love scattered not concentrated Love talked about
The rhyme of the jewel / torn and sore / you pay attention to becomes
A thousand apples you might put in your theories / The Stingy Notions
Of the Bedded Heterosexual / But you are gone from the benefit of my
Love / Does the world belong in you? / No not countable the specificity
Of its love / In the blue descriptive city Stoned men think they are different
From Stoned women / the church is hot the church is hot &climbingoverit
IfellinlikeGreek&Latin / To die practically without mentioning / I can’t
Hear symphonies, can’t hear the popular Songs / the Coming Light / Why
Don’t you spend the hurricane with me / female of art / All the city’s a
Mass of slush and ices / My hand’s your hand in this rhyme of the jewel
You pay attention to / torn and sore / You look at me / This is all fucked up
Time rigorously going / from field to field / the student cereals Floating
Around in, of all Things, milk / A Sonnet is an offer of a previous peace /
She or he Who still tends to titles as if all of us Are reading a new book
Called THE NEW LIFE
Sonnet B
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All reading is blood
So long as the sky, /
a long leafless flower / stalking,
is recognized as a citation
All reading is blood All employment / seems impossible /
a form with consequences / based on the description /
wrk
*
pain
*
wrk
*
pain
This braid is existence / That’s what my sonnet sings / The only words I’ve said today1 /
A compromised paradise / wrk / pain
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1 “Mortal joy is that way” –Bill Callahan
/ I’ve been writing somehow / A Blackbury A female of art / wrk / pain / the peripheral
sonnet I can’t write
a form with consequences
/ the church is hot the church is hot / or if I can I have to /
I must be seriously things /
I must drag it around
/ the Coming Light Why don’t you call it The Prophet the Coming Light
Against all agony / A shard wrecks in peace /
A / A screen A fog All of us********************************************
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know other / How can we / How can********************************************
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the line know other / body All of us********************************************
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failure inside / my own name********************************************
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A sonnet An ode / wicked / of ********************************************
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stealing back A word’s standing ********************************************
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perversity contains / A sentence A dead*******************************************
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A richness I / then room / I am not********************************************
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/ containing I can write a sonnet********************************************
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now / This is my only strength ********************************************
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Yr lot/ my type
“That is less common,
and more rare, than one might think—to die.”
– Mary Ruefle
*
The overgrown tremble or the overgrown rattle or the outside pocket / of frogs
burning along the Florida highway / was unexpected / and at first, assumed to be a
problem with the speakers but was actually a scream / an orbit / a floating / with a hole
punch in them. Before we left for the airport / down the Florida highway, my fingertips
became a rash and they were bright and peeling and bright and peeling and traveling,
briefly, to my legs where a small flare erupted / was unexpected and at first, assumed to
be a problem with the speakers but was actually a scream / an orbit / a floating / with a
hole punch in them.
*
“The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over
their entire bodies from their fingers.” -Akiko Takakura
*
To go on tour.
To go on.
To go on tour.
To go on.
To go on tour.
To go on.
To go on tour.
*
To go on tour is to be cursed with the book.
*
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.
*
“Fuck you, I’m real.” – Emily Brontë
*
“You’ll use what I taught you to manipulate others.” – Emily Kendal Frey
*
*
“Saretta Morgan is black and alive and she thinks you should be, too.” –Saretta Morgan
*
/ Just prior to the motion
/ just prior to the motion of buses
/ just prior to the motion of sitting with A in New York and Pittsburgh and DC
/ just prior to the motion of reading
/ just prior to the motion of building a second performance from / the debris of reading
/ from the motion of the debris of reading / of hearing you say
/ YOU’RE WORRIED ABOUT ME
/ AFTER I READ
/ I HAVE TO PERFORM MY PAIN THE PAIN THAT IS JUST PRIOR TO /
THE MOTION OF VIOLETS / YR VIOLENCE
/ CAN’T WORRY ABOUT ME WHEN I’M ALIVE DESPITE
/ WHEN I’M FUCKING BURNING BUT STILL REFUSING INTO OBLIVION
/ THIS IS WHAT IT IS / TO BE LUMINOUS / SAYS A SCREAM / AN ORBIT /
/ A FLOATING / WITH A HOLE PUNCH IN THEM / the motion
/ of being bound towards / a different city every night
/ just prior to the motion of binding me Stoned men think they are different from
Stoned women
/ They think they shorten war / A and I
/ We r alive, talking / Our time on the water is right here
/ We r alive, talking We die talking We experience the obliterations all at once
/ just prior to the motion of dried papaya /
the motion of the rock I bit down on in the lentil salad /
the motion of the blueberries in LeBron James’ hands in Ohio
/ just prior to the lawyers
/ just prior to the crystals held up with floss
the motion of the rats / the angels on dope slipping / under
the motion of slipping under / a fence with a bruised tooth
a repulsive jewel you pay attention to torn and sore
in their mouths like in my mouth
/ just prior to the motion of sitting with M in the enormous surface /
the motion of sleeping in the same bed with M in Indiana
as animal sounds who care for each other /
the motion of sleeping in the same bed with M in Indiana
to the shock of the Stoned men /
the motion of a body never needs a cunt to be a Stoned women /
the motion of a man can be a body a body / never needs power to meet me
/
as animal sounds who care for each other
/ just prior to the motion of We get out there together /
Singing in the pines / We get out there singing together / I thought mostly
/ of discomfort /
I thought mostly of discomfort as I stood by the window / where N writes
/ just prior to the motion of my own / leaving / I thought mostly of discomfort
/ incarnate + sacred /
It’s here, / the bold darkness, / I thought / as I thought to describe / a chronic loop /
As I thought how to describe / as I thought how to create / a connection for N or you
/ a connection to the sensation of /
a chronic loop / rather than to simply have N or you make contact with / my chronic
loop / of thinking / that is illness and also feeling / To describe that I perform with but
can’t see my body
Just prior to the motion of my own / leaving / I thought mostly of discomfort /
incarnate + tracking / I stood by the window where N writes / and tried to describe
my life / diseased + tracking
-5 yoga classes / week + some running on top of it
-0 days off from wrk / pain / 0 BEERS just prior to the motion of my own / leaving
-my tour / just prior to having to face / the body / that I perform with but can’t see
-I just feel shock / or disgust / Witnessing Instagram
-I’m worse than a corpse / I’m alive,
-I think trying to understand how I, the Blood Barn,
-even appear / a terrible exposure of flesh,
-the initiating / implicating mark
-of an uncontrollable narrative
Mary Ruefle is wrong / I think / or I thought / riding on the bus / eating peppery nuts in
a verdant state / because I am yr verdant bb / 
/ reading Mary Ruefle /
and thinking of
what it means to claim that / to die / dynamically or vividly / to be alive and also a
corpse / and also something else / the language of resilience / is LESS common / and
MORE rare than one might / think
*
“You will remember / but I will die.” –“Planets of the Universe,” Fleetwood Mac
*
“I said, biochemically I am more alive than you. / This is not a lie for the sake of
the line.” –Kelin Loe
*
I know Ruefle means for her statement to be a call to arms / YOU MUST DIE / YOU
MUST ALLOW YOURSELF TO DIE / but I knew how to die before I knew how to live
/ I once practiced /
how to kill myself via refusal / via repeating over and over that I couldn’t / need food /
I was the sea / an impossible charge in the depth / I was the sea / Just a sound / an
unedited version extending /
extending her stay / in the world / I was the sea / the most extreme form of self-hatred
that says, / Don’t hate yourself anymore/ As soon as there is motion / a poem / illness
that is also feeling / As soon as
there is art / As soon as there is a dead body in the cell / a chronic loop / As soon as
there is a dead body in the street / No not countable the specificity Of its love / In the
blue descriptive city
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 / She has no choice but To die
without practically mentioning / She has no choice but To remember all at once and To
not be able to include it all She can’t be straight She falls in love with bodies She can
perform with her body
/ She can feel the organs around her neck She doesn’t need a cunt to be here just
a wound / just a different word for overlapping roughly / for the brutal practice of
overlapping roughly For how we practice
towards each other / overlapping roughly She can’t be straight / Feminism can’t be the
only word for regarding how she dies / for regarding how she lives / for what can’t be
rare We need the motion of our bodies /
We need more/ a cry / for this moment a chronic loop / just prior to the motion of our
bodies just prior to the motion of living / dying She can perform with her body but she
can’t see it She has no choice but To include it all anyway
*
“I am now an exhibit and not a worker.” – Alice Notley
*
I thought about this phrase while I was on tour / When I had not yet read it /
When I had only yet / lived it.
*
If the witch eats the president of The Poetry Foundation / If the witch eats the
president of Facebook / If the witch eats the president of every university / If the witch
eats the president of violence / If the witch eats / ?? / what should happen to her / ?? /
the Sphinx of Literature.
*
“Help me, the rapist said, I’m being hoisted up.” –Feng Sun Chen
*
Album art / The Kossoy Sisters Bowling Green
*
“It’s hard being a little girl because you have to be bad a lot,” says Alice Notley to
Bernadette Mayer’s daughter, Marie. N printed off a long poem of hers for my birthday /
which is the same day as Emily Brontë’s and just prior to The Blue Moon / Sappho’s
boat in a burst /
I read that it’s also just prior to the 50th anniversary of T.S. Eliot’s death
I wonder how many times someone has posted on his grave and told him
he’s still / the best one / at Bread Loaf / We have to find a way to teach
without stealing $$ from students / I sat with S in the kitchen this morning
and there was so much wrk / pain wrk / pain / between us The only words
I’ve said today / Mortal joy is that way I live with these flowers I barely know
/ in Atlanta, GA Mortal joy is that way I call the house The Blue Moon I’m 29
and booked I’m 29 and exaggerating I’m 29 and too personal I’m 29 and
I regard atrocity / Resistance is suffering, I hear the yoga teacher say /
No, I said to S in the car, Resistance is technology / Resistance is an
acknowledgment of suffering, / of the possibility that its lastingness / might be
be unfathomable / A house on the edge of fields / Resistance is a book that can be
illiterate and remembered / as a clump / as a cup / S and I talk about how a
rareness / a book might fall out of the archive / and be lost or be placed
in an airplane hangar in Florida / A house on the edge of fields / and then
brought back to the library / because U made a call and said, I have found this
body / because this is what moves poetry / If that’s not the trace of your
experience / the lost and found body / the illiterate and remembered body /
the clump / the cup / the impossible movement between regarding atrocity
and mortal joy, / then I don’t fucking know why you are lecturing me about
how much I need to behave when I read / Reading ends in a cry / it ends in a call
that says, I have found this body / because that is what moves poetry I will put
ruins in your life / your cute life N says I am getting more unforgiving / N is
reading what I’ve written so far and helping me / he is helping me acknowledge
that I’ve become more unforgiving because he loves me because/ A body doesn’t
need power 2 meet me / in the sound / in the listen / We need 2 meet / 2 meet
in the sound / in the listen / around and beyond Feminism if we’re going to
acknowledge how much a person can love / thought they should be loved /
by another person / if I’m going to acknowledge how much I love this person
who let me stand by the window where he writes and describe what it felt like to
practice killing myself via repeating over and over that I couldn’t / need food /
that food was for / men who had been born / N is helping me become more
unforgiving because forgiveness doesn’t mean you’ll ever see your violence /
because forgiveness doesn’t mean you’ll stop telling me you want poetry to be fun
/ because forgiveness is following the law / because forgiveness is ‘playing the
game’/ the creation and maintenance of a world where I’m buying your stupid
shit on Sky Maul forever / No, you won’t save anyone / Forgiveness means
writing / will try to heal me / because writing means I’ll include it all and
never be able to include it all / help me include it all / help me not include it all
/ You look at me You won’t save me / H gets us a table for 2 and we drink a
champagne with flowers and a cold metal / straw she tells me she can see
narrative in me / but I’m afraid it is too much that already / or narrative is
forgiveness for men who have been born / or I’m a repulsive woman or
I believed that / until I went on tour / until I was cursed with the book and
realized I’m a repulsive woman I’m something worse / than a corpse I’m alive
I’m something worse / than a corpse I’m dead I’m a corpse and I read like
“A growing, laughing, living body” / When you save a life / I will write a hilarious
poem about a dog in a croissant-shaped hat and it won’t be more than 30 lines
so you can stop banning me from bringing my wrk / to class When you save a life
/ I will write a sonnet
*
a sonnet ///
a sonnet /////
a sonnet ///
a sonnet
a sonnet / //// ///////
a sonnet/ /
*
I don’t know how to write a sonnet. I went to bed last night at nine thirty a little
bit drunk / a little sic cunt swollen from crying / from the wrk / pain of my love / from
the wrk / pain of FaceTiming with my love / from the wrk / pain of having moved to
Atlanta, GA without my cat and my love / for a little while. I don’t know how to write a
sonnet / derived / I don’t know where the sonnet comes from. This morning I rode my
bike to my job and listened to people talk about color / If no one tells you the sky is blue,
you might call it white /
If no one tells you how real trauma / terror is for repulsive bodies, you might call
it invisible.
*
All reading is blood
So long as the sky, /
a long leafless flower / stalking,
is recognized as a citation
*
*
“I remember red, black and brown, but nothing else.” –Akiko Takakura
[describing the sky / August 6, 1945 / Hiroshima, Japan]
*
A sonnet I wrote after B wrote me / a letter asking me if I had any poems with the
word corpse in Them / A sonnet I wrote after (Djuna Barnes’) The Book of Repulsive
Women chose me / I didn’t believe in rare books / but the deaths flare up They erupt /
We are wired to look away / to describe this sonnet or the book as being so oddly built
up by other writers / by reading / by corpses / by what each writer means / and that is
wrong I think it is wrong to call it / oddly built / or to emphasize How Much it considers
writing / when writing must consider the holy, tyrannical air / each writer means
I think we know to die / In my MFA did I learn how To ask how many sonnets
will be in the Best New Poets this year or did I learn To die / I ask why / I think we know
to be dismembered I think we know to carry ashes in our arms Flowers, champagne, and
cold metal have / always lived in this space On the phone I smoke one of J’s cigarettes in
Chicago instead of taking the water A offers because my hands are shaking so hard My
hands are shaking so hard when F tells me who I’m working for / A sonnet / I wrote
about how dreaming is hard /
You realize you’ve been dreaming /
You’ve been dreaming / thinking you’ll feel safe / thinking space we live in space
we write / is safe for anyone / to study to admire Only awe, / which is a force / a force
that is illness and also feeling / a force that comes from between what’s terror and
what’s real and what’s glistening / a ribbon / a stream / in my imagination, / keeps my
heart a red belly a mud / “Always, this nowhere to go,” / says Jackie Wang in “THE
FUTURE IS BETWEEN US”/ “I don’t think about where I will go next,” says Jackie
Wang in “THE FUTURE IS BETWEEN US” / I don’t think about where I will go next /
on the bus with A / I shed on my hands thinking going on tour / thinking writing will
only reveal love to me / A sonnet /
*
A sonnet / A lemon pistachio donut
*
A sonnet / I can write / A sonnet / I can’t write / I wrote I write / A sonnet / A
love / wrk / pain A repudiation of everything / wrk / pain The only words I’ve said today
A sonnet / A feral top knot / An indescribable composure She or he Who still tends to
titles / An indescribable composure as if all of us Are reading / a new book Called THE
NEW LIFE.
*
Notes for the Poem / What Spilled / In the Velvet Jungle / From Where:
-Sonnet A is comprised of lines from throughout Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets (Tender
Buttons Press).
-Sonnet B is mostly constructed out of events / places / feelings that took place on over
the course of a book tour I went on with Alexis Pope (+ Mike Krutel when Alexis had to
leave for a short time) from approx. July 7th, 2015 – July 20th, 2015.
-Horoscope #1 comes from the July 2015 horoscopes posted on galacticrabbit.com and
Horoscope #2 comes from the horoscopes posted on chaninicholas.com for the week of
July 2oth, 2015.
-The photo depicting a material version of “Fuck you, I’m real.” – Emily Brontë was
constructed by Nick Sturm as part of a chapbook he made for my 29th Birthday called
ANCIENT LEO.
-When the cover The Kossoy Sisters’ album appears, you might want to listen to “Single
Girl” by The Kossoy Sisters w/ Erik Darling.
-“A growing, laughing, living body,” / is a line I can’t stop thinking about / considering
from Hiromi Ito’s Wildgrass on the Riverbank (Action Books).
-The quotes from Akiko Takakura, a survivor of the Hiroshima atrocity, were taken from
an article the poet Brandon Shimoda shared on his twitter. The Washington Post
published this article, written by Ishaan Tharoor, on August 6th, 2015, the 75th
anniversary of the bombings.
**
CARRIE LORIG is the author of The Pulp vs. The Throne (Artifice Books), which is her first full-length work. Her chapbooks include nods. (Magic Helicopter), Reading as a Wildflower Activist (H_NGM_N), stonepoems (with Sara June Woods, Solar Luxuriance), and Labor Day (with Nick Sturm, Forklift Ohio).