Match

River Halen Guri

Summary

    What is it to be plaster-cast in the dense cream of June?     Robed in a chain mail of summer afternoon, your dainties     hang like bricks from a clothesline, the mouth pares its     possibilities: gape or zip,
   
    and the weed-whackers make no noise at all.
   

   
Robert Brand has given up on real women. Relationships just haven’t ever worked out well for him. He has, however, found a (somewhat problematic) solution, a new feminine ideal: the 110-pound sex doll he ordered over the internet.
   
Showing an uncanny access to the voice of the rejected, unimpressive, emotionally challenged modern male, Helen Guri’s debut collection explores Robert’s transition from lost and lonely to loved, if only by the increasingly acrobatic voices in his mind.
   

   
Match’s touching, whip-smart poems chart the limits of the mind/body relationship in decidedly virtual times. Does our hero’s lovesick, wry, self-searching and often self-annihilating gaze signal some catastrophic aversion to depth or a feverish (if unsettling) reassertion of the romantic impulse? Can anything good really happen when the object of one’s affection is, literally, an object? And if she looks like a human being, can you ever know for sure she isn’t one?
   
Equal parts love story, social parody and radiant display of lyrical gymnastics, Match announces the arrival of a daring, forthright and stubbornly original new talent.

Available since: 09/13/2011.

Print length: 88 pages.

Poetry & Theatre

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