Poetry. PINK ELEPHANT is Rachel McKibbens' collection of beautifully crafted, emotionally searing poems depicting the fractured mythology of a family's tumultuous life. Picking up where Plath and Sexton have left off, McKibbens threatens the comfortable confines of confessional poetry with a take-no-prisoners surrealist and super-real edge. By creating a folklore out of brutality and violence (borne from misplaced or absent love) McKibbens ultimately locates both love and forgiveness, fearlessly placing them in their rightful home. McKibbens' PINK ELEPHANT is an audacious debut.

Pink Elephant

Literature & Fiction

McKibbens, Rachel

Poetry

Cypher Books

Poetry. INTO THE DARK &amp; EMPTYING FIELD is an interrogation of loneliness and its many masks. The book explores innocence as the price of knowledge in a host of voices that share an emotional truth. McKibbens offers a monument of understanding for even the bleakest pieces of our human conundrum.

Into the Dark & Emptying Field

Small Doggies Press

Poetry. The poems in PINK ELEPHANT present an opening where the door didn't quite latch shut, a personal view of childhood confined in a room with violence and trauma. With every new scene, either palpable or surreal, the eyes don't dare turn away; instead they are transfixed, sometimes on the multi–faced monster, other times on the heroine: Survival. Rachel McKibbens's debut collection of poems is offered again in this new second edition, where an interview with the author flips the light switch on and informs our understanding of this unflinchingly bold young life story.

"Throughout [BLUD], McKibbens breathes brilliant life into language, forging lush, rhythmic poems that are both fiercely urgent and tightly controlled, dark and flickering with fairy-tale-like magic. . . . Stunning, unflinching, fearless."―Booklist Starred Review
 "Chicana poet, activist, and witchy folk hero of the disenfranchised. . . . [McKibbens] creates these spaces of witness with her feral and boundary-pushing poems that speak unflinchingly of topics often swept under the rug: rape, domestic violence, body shaming, mental illness, prejudice."―Ploughshares
"McKibbens, a pioneer in the art of performance poetry, presents her audience [with] selfless honesty."―The Rumpus
"Rachel McKibbens . . . reminds us why poetry as testimony is so necessary." ―Poetry Foundation
McKibbens's blud is a collection of dark, rhythmic poems interested in the ways in which inherited things―bloodlines, mental illnesses, trauma―affect their inheritors. Reveling in form and sound, McKibbens's writing takes back control, undaunted by the idea of sinking its teeth into the ugliest moments of life, while still believing―and looking for―the good underneath all the bruising.
From "untitled (lost love)":
To my daughters I need to say: Go with the one who loves you biblically. The one whose love lifts its head to you despite its broken neck. Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric to carry you, gentle the way old grief is gentle. Love the love that is messy in all its too much . . .
Rachel McKibbens is a poet, activist, playwright, essayist, and two-time New York Foundation for the Arts poetry fellow. She is the author of four books and founder of The Pink Door, an annual writing retreat open exclusively to women of color. She lives in Rochester, New York.

blud

United States

Copper Canyon Press

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Books by McKibbens, Rachel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McKibbens, Rachel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Pink Elephant

Into the Dark & Emptying Field

Pink Elephant

blud