Fence Books

Set in a spaced-out future in which all cities have been evacuated after an "Emergency," FLET is named for its female protagonist, an Administration flunky who begins to suspect that the Emergency may be a tool of sociopolitical oppression. An elegant entry in speculative fiction, Flet finds McSweeney slowing her distinctively hyperactive imagination down to the speed of narrative.

A reissue of the instant cult-classic love poem, an investigation of poetic address.

Now that I am not addressing you
But the "you" of poetry
I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.
But this "I" is the I of poetry
And it should be able to do more than I can do.

This text is filthy and fertilized, filling and emptying, filling and emptying, atrocious and politic with meaning. The Cow is a mother, a lover, and a murdered lump of meat, rendered in the strongest of languages. I cannot count the altering that happens in the very large rooms that are the guts of her.

To call Ariana Reines’ poetry scatological doesn’t even scratch the surface. “I COULD BE A DIAPER FOR THE DAY’S RESIDUALS,” she writes, and, “She clasped the event to her and proceeded. Fucked her steaming/ eyehole and ended it.” The Cow is a body in the way that texts are bodied—”Are you so intelligent your body doesn’t have you in it.”—but not in the way that allows the text to become desensitized, depersonalized, sterilized.

Winner of the 2006 Alberta Prize