Baby, I Don't Care

(Hardback)

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Description

• A new collection from a poet with a cult readership after nearly a decade-long hiatus.
• Innovative use of movie dialogue from '20s and '30s cinema in a highly original poetic project.
• Many lines and scenes would be recognizable to cinephiles.
• Entertaining and often funny poems of tongue-in-cheek jesting that also powerfully illuminate the conundrums of desire.
• A book that complicates conventional thinking about gender and relationships, as well as wealth and status.
• The poems accumulate into a dramatic narrative arc over a sequence of topics (such as "success," "boredom," "romance," and "death").

Reviews

Minnis impishly taunts the senses in this scintillating vaudeville of vice, greed, and sexism. Through the sassy, vamp-y, diamond-adorned persona of a self-proclaimed hungry tigress, readers are subjected to a sardonic, melodramatic monologue that was inspired by classic movies and often feels like a lucid dream. . . . With an unparalleled sense of absurdist whimsy, Minnis runs through a litany of debaucherous and obsessive behaviors while engendering empathy, curiosity, and self-reckoning.
Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Minnis's first book in nine years bears the hallmarks of a work that took time.Baby, I Don't Careis a wonder of problem-solving, building on previous books and not merely repeating them. Though the humor is as sharp as ever, the persona and golden lines Minnis spent years honing have more of an animating form to support them this time, and it lends the collection a wholeness and emotional arc a cut above many poetry collections. Finally, here's love."
James Butler-Gruett,Entropy Mag

"Baby, I Don't Careis a work of monstrous appetitesit's insatiable, sensational, in need of the gaze while always playing indifferent to it. Like a cat toying with a bloodied mouse grows bored and leaves it to bleed out, Minnis's speaker is merciless in her needs and yawns in the face of their destructions.
The Arkansas International

"An endless dance of attraction and alienation between text and reader. . . . No one else is writing poetry quite like this: funny, willfully superficial in tone, but with teasing hints that something serious is at stake."
Barry Schwabsky,Hyperallergic

"Cut into 39 sections with titles such as 'Laziness', 'Gold Digger', 'Murder', 'Iceberg', and 'Greatness', Minnis exploits herself, her lovers, money, sex and much more . . . Using her lyrical tone, Minnis oozes sarcasm and sparkles as she explores the oddities of the world around her.
Julia Cirignano,Julia's Book Reviews

"The book is pervaded with old-world 'movie' charmthe cod-aristocratic languor, the English archaisms . . . the drawl-speed of the delivery. . . . It's a whole world, distant yet known, whose gaudy-eerie strangeness flickers romantically beside the factual glare of our own century."
Sam Riviere,Poetry Society UK

"The work fromBaby, I Dont Careis slightly less dark . . . and somewhat funnier . . . Here Minnis re-establishes herself as perhaps our best, most biting, black-comic poet. Her poems sting."
Kevin O'Rourke,Colorado Review

Author Bio

Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.