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The Hot Garment of Love is Insecure
Elizabeth Reddin
January 2007
Victory, I remember dreaming of you only when I was awake
when I was asleep it was
all chase and taking apart limb by limb. I imagined cutting my hands off… I can see how to get the first one gone but then I am stuck with how to rig the falling knife with my foot and a string. There is so much blood I fall over and always am embarrassed to be found still with one hand.
Give me dreams of what it is where they are. There is no other way to find ourselves living alongside time, they live alongside time when the lines are red.
We’re letting it go all over down there now—
It startles and unsettles. It jabs and snarls.
Art Voice
The Hot Garment of Love is the first book of poetry from Brooklyn-based poet and performer Elizabeth Reddin.
About the Author
Elizabeth Reddin was born in Torrance, California at the Little Company of Mary Hospital; in 1993 she moved to New York City. She plays music in a story band called Legends, with Raquel Vogl and James Loman, and teaches GED classes. Her work has been published in The Brooklyn Rail as well as in UDP's newspaper New York Nights and poetry journal 6×6. Please write to her at elizabethreddin [AT] gmail.com.
Praise
This book is a filmic immersion in the sensorium of a being seeking to understand its incarnation in the body of a girl. The girl's struggle with her consciousness and her search for some stable ground of reality reads like a lyric existential detective novel. Exquisite descriptions, observations, and meditations are subjected to multiple, even contradictory interpretations, and the narrative arises from tactile linkages that announce themselves almost subliminally, rather than being predetermined. Each phrase, each paragraph tells a little story, and in the space between them Reddin generously makes room for the reader's own storehouse of experiences to interact. Oh sure, there're anxiety, terror, shame, horror, confusion, and the occasional bloodbath mixed in with the shockingly beautiful images, but Reddin's touch is so light that coming along for the ride inside her mind is pure pleasure. Basically, this is the only book I want to read right now.
Laurie Weeks
In the News
Publication Details
ISBN: 978-1-933254-27-2
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 72 pp, 7 x 10 in
Publication Date: January 01 2007
Distribution: SPD