in paradise one cannot read Kafka
I have never read Kafka
the super-virginal color is blue
you must believe
all women and brown folk
on the inside are blue
and the poem will give you a brown vagina
and this blue room
let’s all be alone in the same blue room
at the same time
let’s close our eyes
let’s choose the afterimage
a puddle yes
no one cleans in paradise
Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife
Jennifer Nelson
December 2015
Exciting and incredibly compelling...it swept me away.
Matthew Rohrer
In the United States and Europe in the early twenty-first century, a person of mixed ethnicity finds herself questing inside old European art and ideas. Terrible as these things often are, she enjoys recalibrating them, and she is optimistic.
About the Author
Jennifer Nelson is the author of Aim at the Centaur Stealing Your Wife (UDP); Civilization Makes Me Lonely, winner of the Sawtooth Prize (Ahsahta); and Harm Eden (UDP). Her work has appeared in Panda’s Friend, A Perfect Vacuum, Social Text, The Baffler, The Brooklyn Rail, and elsewhere; she was the Offen Poet at the University of Chicago in 2020. She is also assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the author of Disharmony of the Spheres: The Europe of Holbein’s Ambassadors (Penn State University Press).
Praise
Jennifer Nelson's Aim At The Centaur Stealing Your Wife is an exciting and incredibly compelling mix of art history, video games, shape-shifting and counterhacking China. Nelson's thinking is twisty and generous and it is a pleasure to watch her make Breugel and Occupy Wall Street meet each other and make perfect sense. Or make sonnets using Billy Idol as a jumping off point. But underneath all of this is the book's true pleasure--Nelson's smart, hilarious, omnivorous voice. It swept me away.
Matthew Rohrer
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-937027-51-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 88 pp, 4.5 x 7.5 in
Publication Date: December 01 2015
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)