Zirconia

Book excerpt: Chelsey Minnis's formal invention and wild personae represent a progressive yet individualized position in the galaxy of truly contemporary poetry. Zirconia's female speaker is by turns fatigued, charmed, wishful, battered, sly, perverse, and omnipotent. These poems engage a material world not unlike ours yet featuring a phantasmagorically elliptical relationship to the dimension of real action. Her speaker is detached, but alive to the poignancy of detachment, and through the "silver lips of a feverish child" invites connectivity by means of tenderness and brutality. Long pauses, enforced by strings of gemlike punctuation, allow for the reader's digestion of hilarious, frightened, sometimes frightening substance. One is compelled to follow trails of feminine intuition, savagery, ennui, fantasy, and intimacy to their diabolical, fruitful conclusions. Zirconia is accessible, confrontational, hilarious, occasionally shocking, never ever dull, and often extremely moving.