Yes, I am a corpse flower
“...articulates the ache and bliss that accompany occupying a (queer) body at odds with the (heteronormative, late-capitalist) world.”
“Sharp’s collection here walks that beautiful poetic line between the grandiose and the understated. This collection is equal parts theatrical and painfully realist.”
“...a cheeky rebuke of Capital, playful and fun and not so feckless in its pew pew at such an obvious target. Abstractions can’t abstract their way out of a paper bag, but good poems can help you laugh, turn the bag into a ventilator for a minute.”
Yes, I am a corpse flower composes a queer lyric meditation on body, identification, and subjectivity, proposing a queer poetics not just referential, limited to language’s meaning. These are not poems about queerness, but composed queerly: eccentric, off-centre, oblique, to twist. Poems that failingly and flailingly attempt to define the queer “I,” that skepticize any stable connection between queer self and body, narrate an unnarratable encounter with self-recognition outside of categorizable identity. These poems are composed from a feeling that to state queerness can never be to expound on a single journey, but to gather together a multitude of I’s of which this I, here, writing this paragraph, is only one iteration. I is not this one, but neither is I an other, but a we, perversely licked-linked through language, a sort of tongue: limn me, limn me!
Knife Fork Book / 2021 / isbn: 978-1-989355-27-5
