Rachel Rabbit White's Porn Carnival + Ben Fama's Deathwish
Rachel Rabbit White's Porn Carnival + Ben Fama's Deathwish
In partnership with Wonder, we can’t imagine a more perfect poetry bundle at a friendly holiday discount than Rachel Rabbit White’s Porn Carnival (Wonder, 2019) and Ben Fama’s Deathwish (Newest York, 2019)
PRE-ORDER — ShipsDecember 1, 2019.
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In Porn Carnival, the debut full-length collection by Rachel Rabbit White, hedonism and materialist critique join in an abject orgy of labor confessionals, group texts, and criminality. White’s deliberate, dominating voice evokes a Plath-like dynamism turned on to queer pleasure and displeasure, indulgence and raison d’être, the bedevilments of a gay bitch on the pole.
“Rachel Rabbit White is a state of being where beauty is crafted and exploded into new form of God. Vast violent ecstatic cumming Rachel has crafted a labyrinthine of poetic rumination resembling a heaven of sexy thorny sparking love.”
— Precious Okoyomon
“Rachel Rabbit White’s exquisite debut, Porn Carnival, braids lumpen poetry and luxury communism into a delicate rope encircling its readers. Writing in the tradition of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Chelsey Minnis, White’s poetics produce radical empathy for those who struggle in the margins and violently rejects the normalized oppression of status quo. Broken hearted but still turned on, Porn Carnival is a book that keeps on going, bringing us a first collection that is truly ‘poetry to impress the gods.'”
— Elaine Kahn
“This book presents a rich, wild, sometimes gritty panorama of life in the early 21st-century city, a post-crash terrain of precarious living and transactional intimacy. Sometimes funny, often dark, unafraid of abjection and extremity and equally unafraid of poetic power: these poems combine brilliant scene-making with psychological depth and specificity. Rachel Rabbit White offers a complex, dramatic, sometimes sardonic, often tender voicing: an exploration of consciousness and its whiplashes amidst ongoing social and sexual life.”
— Maureen Mclane
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Ben Fama's Deathwish drops us back into the beauty and the fantasies teased out in his first book Fantasy, re-braiding them through BDSM scenarios, metaphysical inquiries, and the maximalism of the contemporary.
Ben Fama’s “I” is a desolate seer; his “you” is us all; reading Deathwish is a role play. These sexy, uncluttered poems are love notes and accusations saturated with a personal/political heartsickness I find weirdly consoling. Fama’s vivid, semi-abstract renderings of moments within our terrible moments are gifts.
— Johanna Fateman
Deathwish finds beauty in scarcity and drained resources—nudes take up all the data, and brunch is a blackout. These poems want to die young, but instead live out the melancholy of endurance. I loved this book.
— Chelsea Hodson
If your iPhone had any feelings it would write like Ben Fama.
— Ariana Reines
Ben Fama is a writer based in New York City. He is the author of Fantasy (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015), and the chapbooks Odalisque (Bloof, 2014), Cool Memories (Spork, 2013), New Waves (Minutes Books, 2011), and Aquarius Rising (Ugly Duckling Presse 2010). He is also the author of the artist book Mall Witch (Wonder, 2012). He is the co-founder of Wonder.