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"Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream-meets another—this is the landscape where these poems unfold," Kathryn Nuernberger writes of Rivka Clifton's, Wrong Feast. Indeed, in Cliftons’ second full-length collection, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry engaging Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.” Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny — a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head is deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone is birthed into a crib . . . Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention, while fully considering the ambiguities and the possibilities within Clifton’s creations. These are not merely poems of action and consequence, but ones of call and response. They will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails.
They are the entrails.
“Wrong Feast is a book situated in ethereal ecotones and liminal minglings. Where the erotic meets mortality, where the spirit meets the body, where one dream-meets another—this is the landscape where these poems unfold. With exquisite lyricism, visceral imagery, and deep insight, Rivka Clifton crafts transformative poems of becoming that smoke and singe.” —Kathryn Nuernberger, author of Held: Essays in Belonging
“'Visitation,” one of the many contemporary fables in Rivka Clifton’s striking Wrong Feast, ends with a satyr disgorging “dozens of paper balls” that “came / out and blossomed into deposit slips when they hit the ground.” Clifton’s poems issue forth many such surprises and transformations: Matryoshka dolls quaking on a shelf, an alligator with a python’s head, a fish with dollars spilling from its gut, a man romping in a dog mask. The book’s surreal narratives unfold in gas station parking lots and fence-lined city streets and pulsating clubs, meditating on an urban world marked by capitalism, popular culture, mass production, and, of course, consumption. Wrong Feast is wryly and darkly humorous and also elegiac, its many eyes turned to societal cruelty, environmental decay, and to more particular and personal losses. “Too often the eye cannot make sense of what it sees,” “The Awkward Animal” tells us, but in these remarkable poems, Clifton helps us envision a way through our bewilderment.” —Corey Marks, author of The Rock That Is Not A Rabbit