Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence

(Paperback)

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Cartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricaturea cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love's name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again.Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.

Reviews

Every single poem in Alexus Erins Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erins full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into lovethis is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asidesit will make you hungry. - Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian Woman

In Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality's patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much morea giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky. Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz andSad13

In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker's voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life. Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Alabama Poet Laureate

Alexus Erins words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erins poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erins words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric. Nabila Lovelace, author of Sons of Achilles and editor at Divedapper

Alexus Erin knows there is a"tide to turn" these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violenceinvestigates the complexity of life at the intersections:between Blackness and being"wholly and entirely a woman," between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hangthere "gravitynegated by fear" all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. "How else does one encounter the God / question" Truly, anexpansive work. -Adam Falkner, author of The Willies

Author Bio

Alexus Erin is an American poet, performer, and Ph.D. candidate living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Red Flag Poetry, Silk + Smoke, and a host of other publications. She is the author of two chapbooks: Two Birds, All Moon (Gap Riot Press, 2019) and St. Johns Wort (Animal Heart Press, 2019). Alexus Erin has been the 2018 Poetry Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference, a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a certified doula, and emo enthusiast.