Cadaver Dogs
by Rebecca Loudon
ISBN: 978-0-615-24969-8
Publication Date: November 2008
82 Pages
$15
Now Available at Lulu for $12.75 (15%!d(MISSING)iscount)
Available at B&N, Amazon, Powells
SMALL PRESS SPOTLIGHT: REBECCA LOUDON
Rauan Klassnik Interviews Rebecca Loudon
What People are Saying about Cadaver Dogs:
Cadaver Dogs howls, nips, humps and growls. It rolls in some serious shit. Sniff it out. It is a marvelous book.
— Tom Beckett at Galatea Resurrects, read entire review here
Loudon is masterful (mistressful?) at mining the loaded terrain of the subconscious mind in all of its ticking, twitching, palpitating glory. But as one might gather from the last descriptive word in that list, it's not just about the mind, it's also about the body- situated in the tricky, sticky intersections between the psyche and the flesh. She gives voice to evocative, throbbing, churning, lustful pieces of what lies beneath the teeth and the fur and the cotton; what flows through the blood with painful or sultry or poisonous or dangerous connotations.
— Juliet Cook at Associated Content, read entire review here
The images in this book vibrate. “Mars hangs above you like a meat chime.” “An ovary red dress.” “Let me release the thin broth tadpole-/sticky lake from between my legs.” Cadaver Dogs gives us a fast and furious poetry of “linguistic impulse” (poet Denise Levertov’s term) fused with a poetry of visceral impulse, and rushes of hyped up innuendo. Multiple sensory cataracts pour forth on every page. Whether their mode is pensive, elegiac, sexual or all of the above, these poems embrace the undomesticated, taking as a given the fact that humans are perpetually channeling the various animals we contain. Want vividness and gusto, postmodern sensitivity, lingual rapture? Consume this book, or let it consume you.
— Amy Gerstler
This collection is a hungry jukebox full of alluring, bittersweet music. Beginning with Loudon’s dedication page, where pets' names act like rabbit holes for a world of poems whose speakers are ripe with desire to be both animal and human, her lines lure us into a radiant, devastating place burning with color and sound, blood and bees—yet she does so with a kind of frightening grace few poets possess.
— Jared Leising, author of The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio
A bee in a yellow dress appears
When the change comes
it will be severe
it will be a drowning
it will be a plane crash
it will be the boy from honor camp who waved to me across
the lake when I was 12 followed me home stood outside my
window for 16 days whispering I’m going to kill you
he meant it that boy that boy
I am out of time
bind my ankles with a Flo-Motion jump rope
barter
suffocate
penny farthing bicycle
propped against the shed
I love these biting games
pinching games
slapping games
what will you trade
this time
what will you take
what
