Description

In Caroline Chavatel’s riveting debut, we encounter a speaker who has “broken / the fourth wall of my desire,” and who speaks urgently to the dead and the living and the self, who, like all of us, “move so elegantly through the world never / knowing the ash-trails we may leave.” These are poems of burning contemporary restaurants and historic circuses, where the 1920s tiger tamer the Marvelous Mabel Stark and Zazel, the human projectile, coexist with echoes of William Blake and Rae Armantrout. Chavatel’s poems move searchingly between “makeshift spotlight[s]” and the “makeshift animal” of a contemporary woman and daughter.

—Alexandra Teague, author of [ominous music intensifying]

Chavatel’s masterful first collection interrogates the idea of goneness through spectacle, debt and loss. The poems ask if everything that ever was matters in ripples, if what was ignored might be raised up new again and mean different. The poems refuse to cede any ground to nothingness or ennui. They insist we are born of what disappears and, as we appear in the wake of it, our own disappearing ushers forth every possibility, everything new.

—John A. Nieves, author of Curio

Summoning the strange and brutal landscapes of turn-of-the-century circuses and modern reality television, Caroline Chavatel’s Consume Her stages spectacle as both familial inheritance and trap. With similar sleight of hand, Chavatel weaves American heritage and self-mythos into her meditative, linguistically precise interrogation of consumerism and the cost of performing an attractive life: “Remember all the times I’ve wasted / my body? What does it mean, enough?” These poems revel in the body as commodity, actor, witness, demanding what remains when desire, labor, and visibility collapse into one another. Razor-sharp, anthropological, and transformative, Consume Her is everything a debut collection of poetry should be.

—Jill Mceldowney, author of Otherlight