major characters in minor films
Sundress Publications. 2015
ISBN: 978-1939675194
$12.00
get it here from Sundress Publications
"In Kristy Bowen's major characters in minor films, language moves like a camera, cutting from image to image, leaving impressions that form intriguing fragmented narratives of love, intrigue, mystery and damage. Populated with both the familiar and the strange, with rabbits and birds as well as whiskey and fire, the journey through the scenes these poems create is a wild and rich ride."
-Donna Vorreyer, author of A House of Many Windows
"Get ready: Kristy Bowen’s major characters in minor films casts our favorite muse du jour in a 'white-hot, white dress.' Through poems that are lyrical, irreverent, and a little bit naughty, we discover the swanky, labyrinthine interior of her straight-to-DVD universe: remember, she tells us in 'movie of the week,' 'Everybody loves a victim, especially the blonde, pretty kind.' Through scathing missives to James Franco and sensual harangues directed at the moon, our wine-stained diva tempts us through vivacious non sequiturs to the 'poem within a movie within a girl-shaped world' in all of us."
-Sara Henning, author of A Sweeter Water
"I want to be best friends with the 'I' of this book. She’s hilarious. She’s heartbreaking. She’s more than a little bit dangerous. Whether she’s writing about crying on the bus or hiding a knife under the sink, she deals out her words like a card shark—fast, sure, sly. What’s not to love about such a deft performance of wit, skill, and heart?"
-Sara Biggs Chaney, author of Ann Coulter's Letter to the Young Poets
"In this stunning full-length collection, Kristy Bowen speaks to us of love and desperate longing, of loss of mothers and lovers, of health and identity, of the disguises we don, the structures we enforce, the strategies we adopt for putting ourselves back together after being torn apart. With fresh, inventive language, both lush and compact, every line with a new surprise, but never forced, never false, Bowen leads us on a sensually arousing of the psyche. These poems beg to be read and re-read, burning white hot, always singeing, always singing."
-Michael Albright
reviews
Spoiler alert: this is not your mama’s reel-to-reel; rather, it is realpoetry in realtime, under ambient light, through a lens of quirk and daggers, replete with drama, disaster, and conflagration. This is truly a one-woman show, with Bowen perfectly cast as the ingénue, the naughty daughter, the provocateur, the seductress, et al.
Although a dark read, major characters is also witty and sometimes even snarky. The narrator is not only aware of her faults but she also admits to the reader that she is aware of these shortcomings, giving this book a refreshing and engaging tone: “If I stay perfectly still, you can make / out the hairline cracks in my story, / the bit of salt in the cake.”