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.”
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
