Children of the Bad Hour
Purdey Lord Kreiden
December 2014
from “HERRINGS”
i play with your balls because i’m on top
i take place where Heaven and earth are now the same dwelling place
for gods and humans, and there is the wiping away of all tears, grey caballistic
Porridges columns of cedars collapsing in abstinance your hand
Winged penetrating your own penis when you sleep
your feet go up above his shoulders, and he holds you in place
you’re unable to believe in heaven when you’re hard, A perfectly beautiful yard?
you’re hard, your mother wipes your mouth with a napkin, a butter of blue gaze-sung sperm
the fervor of the herring when its supple pity is spliced with small dew togas
Maybe she was coming just like grass. Yes, that must be it
the calm mist of translucent postcards mooching around fields
and unbearable black incense scooping out the kernel echo off the hair
you are even a little tighter
Children of the Bad Hour is Kreiden’s first published collection, taking its name from a commemorative tattoo (“ENFANT DU MALHEUR”) shared by former child inmates of the Mettray Penal Colony, where Jean Genet spent part of his childhood and subsequently referred to with ambivalent fondness as a galley. “To be locked at sea is much fun,” Kreiden writes—and so this work of irrepressible freedom attests. Her collection Scolopendrum was out from Action Books in 2016.
About the Author
Purdey Lord Kreiden’s poetry has appeared in the Claudius App, 3AM, Gobbet, the Yalobusha Review, and in Saturnalia Press’s Gurlesque Anthology. Her co-translation with Michael Thomas Taren of L’ILE ATLANTIQUE by Tony Duvert is forthcoming from Semiotext(e). They are currently translating En Ménage by Joris-Karl Huysmans (Wakefield Press). Their photofolktales can be seen at 1thousandand101001nights.tumblr.com
Praise
In the beginning was the bad hour, or in the beginning of which we are conscious was the absence of time. At that time, “pounding, in the meantime,” God fucked & was fucked by the bad hour into existence. Thus, when Yeats wrote "The Hour Before Dawn," he warned and prayed for the spirits to show just such an hour as the hour to which US children belong, because this book belongs to us, as we belong to it. He wrote: “no half-legged fool / Shall dip his nose into Purdey Lord Kreiden’s book / Merely for stumbling on this hole / In the bad hour before the dawn…/ For all life longs for the Last Day / And there's no man but cocks his ear / To know when Michael's trumpet cries / That US can abyss US’s sexes / into the form of a mythical beast / And there be nothing but God left.” If a total and primordial orgy can take place in the built world, this is it. Kreiden re-undifferentiates all the –mancies, Nancy. She makes you ask what kind of –mancy is divination by playing “with your balls because I’m on top” or caressing "the fuzzy clitoris”? As we want to, you’ll want to. To abandon yourself to her fever dream of incest and sacrifice, fossils and meteorites, blue blood and the Ancient Roman fascinus. You’ll peek into a glory hole to see the stars. She LITERALLY masturbates poems into existence, and in the process pussywips Artaud, rips Bataille a new one. She recommends that we “have a cunt-to-cunt talk with god” and prophesies that we, her obedient readers, will do what she does so well in this magnificent first book: “You will slander the gods in your body you will unleash them.” That is, her work proves true the Blakean proverb, “To create a little flower is the labour of ages.” Children of the Bad Hour is that flower—that flower is our hymen—and our species has been crafting it for millions of years. We might finally be ready. But who is we?
Jane Gregory and Sara Nicholson
Purdey Lord Kreiden makes me harder than belief in heaven. most adults don’t have memories...children of the bad hour. i can’t chew my food because she shaped it in blood. i want the twined movement spread by Purdey’s plants, into the sky, the world would partially watch me, and may the rest rub purdey’s faint hand to crush me. the skin i wear is, is cretin. i have never read anything else.
Jared Joseph
This is like chapter 0 of the cadence of your panpipes. I have now a lifelong enemy. I walk into every poem with a cock in my mouth. It’s always 4:20. My dick and balls slip out of my pants while we’re playing moontan. Hoodies and candies under pons, you would never know of strawberry, of laughlaughter, the nymphea are the same tongue that ache you into life. One day the exile will end, it may be true that travelers rest, discrete, and wholly, free, isolated and at rest, the sun breaking on englobements. Protect the rune-impregnated gesture that trends us through this space. Think the moon, and then the heart, the heart smooshed into a crater, a blue battlement that dissolved in Niobe. I was once stroking your arm saying “this is only a memory” while we were on acid and you were saying “no.” We were listening to Moss Icon that whole night.
Michael Thomas Taren
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Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 40 pp, 6 x 9 in
Publication Date: December 15 2014
Distribution: Direct Only