The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Still Life by Kimberly Ann Priest


This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Genevieve Pfeiffer, is from Still Life by Kimberly Ann Priest, released by [Pank] Books in 2020. 

Content warning for pedophilia

my pedophile is obsessed with details

when he says appropriate // he is not referring to the number of dollies in the room / or how well they are centered on the tables / or whether or not the items on the dollies are centered on the dollies / or the arrangement of the room is equal to the arrangement of dollies / so that the dollies themselves do not attract all of the attention in the space // he is referring to whether or not they are essential to the space since the rooms should not be a compositions of dollies // as in / some attention should be given to the frame of things // for instance // the fact that all the items in the room are less than the room // the windows / the plaster / the paint // the hard wood floors / the doorways / the beams beneath / above / behind everything // these things / he says / are essential // having nothing to do with my hands or my feet / or how they are connected to my body // or how he wants the right to space everything symmetrically // rearrange a life in the most appropriate way


Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist for the American Best Book Awards, as well as chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower, and still life. Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, EcoTheo, Borderlands and other journals. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

Genevieve Pfeiffer is a poet, writer, and scholar. Their masters project at New York University explores ideological shifts around birth control & abortion and their intersections with nature & culture. Read more about this project at the link below.

sundresspublications

Leave a Reply