<p>Once upon a time, ancient glaciers oozed light through the general living room of America, scraping the terrain into the sweeping prairies of the Midwest, a superlatively grassy expanse in which American bison cavorted with dangerous electric fish-goats and no one got hurt. That was a long time ago. Then one day we woke up and it was everywhere: Ultramegapraireland. Referentially crammed and brimming with cultural bling, the poems in Ultramegaprairieland range from forlorn to flipped out, citing and subverting far-flung sources high, holy, and Wtf. "I wrote all of the poems after moving back to the Midwest from the Middle East," explains Workman. "They are all somehow symptomatic of my inability to adjust, not to the Midwest per se, but just in general. Surviving the Midwest is all about juxtaposition." Elisabeth Workman is the author of several chapbooks. This is her first book-length collection. She lives in Minneapolis with designer/typographer Erik Brandt and their daughter.</p>

Ultramegaprairieland: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Workman, Elisabeth

History & Criticism

Bloof Books

“To blurb this book, I submerged my brain in its popping polyvatic village cauldron, its speaking sung thru me like comets as cosmic Cuntos. These are unbinding spells. Give consciousness back to the matriarchy. Wouldn’t the mothering of consciousness be better? Secretes E, her potions conjunct her linguistic glamour. She unspirals us from patriarchal overmind, while pregnant and dancing forth into space with the goddesses. This arrow is so sharp and plumed. Pleasure. Badass. Brilliant. Lava. Matrilineal gnosis. Revolution, she says and does: afterbirth it, claim, re-enact, cuntify it. Spell your spell. As Freud was wrong about women he was wrong about death (duh). Drive? Death can be mothered. Father Uterus* (*Hiromi Ito). Channeling as uterine prerogative (‘spiked ghost blossoms.’) FEED YOUR HEAR. Mother’s milk/tongue. RIDE IAMBIC PIGS. LOL let’s crack it open and BE NO DESOLATION. Be witchery, wall-less, altered, alert. ‘We might reclaim killjoy to mean an ample empathy.’ Be these magical actions. Absolutely feminine, disobedient, radiant, scathing.” –Sarah Fox  “One of the infuriating and regular pieces of advice from the etheric beings to me is ‘play.’ END is an achievement in play. It is true joy. It is perfect gemini anxiety/flexibility and human strength, sitting with and passing through difficult fury and ugly love. Genius survival mode gameplay in a world already over.” –Feng Sun Chen  “Unike wedlock with digital clocks, time in this endlessness is no desolation plus today I queefed on god plus each, every, and all of the bodies’ transformations plus puss plus serious muppet logic plus ectoplasmic nun fetus plus bird alphabets form trauma maps plus no blue distance to the whole machine plus the monster truck of the endocrine plus the anthroposcenery plus Elisabeth Workman threads spinal chords all through the big fucked up everything for us.” –Michael Sikkema  “How to begin without comparing this book to the books that keep getting called ‘home’ / How to begin by saying instead of reading this book, Elisabeth Workman’s ENDLESSNESS IS NO DESOLATION, this book sits down with me to draw a life / maybe mine / maybe a cave’s / It draws in soft light and red, “feeling across violent edges.” We consider the sea / ‘momentum bitches / & / waves / the tension’ / We consider endlessness / so history / the sculpted manuscript / the boring vault, doesn’t have to be the water source. Pussy Wallow, the Bird of Paradox, a mother / the noise of love that surrounds her faces me and says, ‘Do you have a fucked-tongue, too?’ Her faces me and her faces are me and faces her and me / We raise our skirts to the war and say, ‘RIDE IAMBIC PIGS.’ This book folds in on itself and seeds itself / knows seeds are notes / knows there is so much that is unfathomable / unshapeable / but insistent about the world / the seen and the unseen and pain and its dream time / so why not / fucking celebrate / why not fucking move through it like a body / like wound or thought.” –Carrie Lorig

Endlessness is No Desolation

Poetry

Dusie

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