Radioapocrypha

by BK Fischer

Overview

A novella in verse, Radioapocrypha envisions what would have happened if Jesus Christ had arrived for the first time not in Palestine two thousand years ago but in a subdivision in Maryland in 1989, the year Depeche Mode released “Personal Jesus.” In this suburban retelling of the gospel, Jesus is a hunky post-punk high school chemistry teacher and the disciples are a twelve-member garage band. The story unfolds as recorded testimony and overheard teachings, a series of alternating lyric poems, prose poems, and parables that engage the social, sexual, and racial tensions of an era. Told from the point of view of the Magdalen character, named Maren—and drawing from the Gnostic text known as the Gospel of Mary as well as other scriptural sources—these poems sample widely from popular music and 1980s culture to recast and revivify a gritty, surreal, crackpot story of loners, losers, and lovers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814254646
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	02/01/2018
Series:	OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY
Edition description:	1
Pages:	82
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

BK Fischer is an award-winning poet and poetry editor at Boston Review. Her collections of poetry include Mutiny Gallery and St. Rage’s Vault.
 
 

Read an Excerpt

Parable of the Mower
 

One airless August afternoon, half a dozen kids

got hired for $3 an hour to pass out a thousand flyers

for the heating and cooling company owned by one

 

of their dads, covering a neighborhood with streets

named for poets: Keats, Spenser, Sidney, Pope.

Municipal mowers droned from the drainage sloughs

 

between the houses and ball fields, scattering

grass clippings as they crossed the medians

and idled at the curbs. The only girl in the group

 

noticed that most of the driveways she climbed

to tuck the rolled-up flyer in the storm door

had oil spots in the shape of horses. On one,

 

a bloodied mouse was caught under a piece

of green tinsel—when it lifted off the corpse

she saw that it was a swarm of emerald flies.



 

(Litmus)

You think you can hold a piece of pH paper up to a person and tell if a taste of him will burn the tongue? Dilute your fear. A dye extracted from lichen: blue turns red in the presence of an acid; red turns blue in the presence of an alkali. Boys of the border states, you seem to forget we’re south of the Mason-Dixon in a swamp that would have seceded if Lincoln hadn’t held it under martial law. Draw a sip of the sample into the paper and see. No, I don’t have a perm. What the hell is wrong with you, Jordan—we don’t go around touching people’s hair like it’s a petting zoo. I’ve dined with drummers against my better judgment. I’ve tried to titrate this poison one drop at a time. I’ve tested eighty drams of antidote. We need a deluge. Nobody believes me, but Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise, held tonight in the 20th precinct in Manhattan, are innocent. We need a water-soluble mixture. We need the rate of forward reaction to exceed the rate of reverse reaction. In a state of equilibrium, reactants and products come to rest in concentrations that have no further tendency to change. No further tendency to change with time. Equilibrium is not peace.

Table of Contents

Enunciation 3

Our Lady of the Subdivision 4

(Teacher) 5

Parable of the Mower 6

Our Lady of Walgreens 7

(Kiddie Pool) 8

Our Lady of Cinderblock 9

Our Lady Of The Garage Band 11

(Litmus) 13

Our Lady Of The Hair Cuttery 14

Garage Gospel 15

Our Lady of the Bay 17

(Homeopath) 18

Our Lady of 80s Punk 19

(Predestination) 21

Our Lady of the Bachelor Pad 22

(Half Life) 24

Parable of the Slut 25

(Mojo) 26

Our Lady of the Access Road 27

(Insomnia) 28

Our Lady Of The Quarry 29

Parable of the Cheerleader 31

Our Lady of Safeway 32

(Shepherd) 33

Our Lady of Marshalls 34

(Orbitals) 35

Our Lady of the Prom 36

(Demons) 37

Our Lady of the Slots 38

(Beatitudes) 40

Our Lady of the Permanent Sub 41

Parable of the Keg 42

Our Lady of the Auditorium 43

Garage Gospel 44

Parable of the Donut 47

(Miracles) 48

Our Lady of Kentucky Fried Chicken 49

Our Lady of Formica 51

Denial 52

Dispassion (Friday) 53

(Wreck) 55

Dispassion (Saturday) 56

Dispassion (Sunday) 57

Our Lady of the Pricker Bush 58

Garage Gospel 59

(Tongues) 63

(Script) 64

(Ascension) 65

Our Lady Of Frank's Nursery & Crafts 66

Renunciation (Half Life) 68

Notes 71

Acknowledgments 73

Editorial Reviews

The New Testament gets a remix in poet B. K. Fischer’s verse novella Radioapocrypha, a pagan rejoinder to the biblical story of redemption. An homage to a 1980s adolescence, it might also be one of the more necessary poetry collections for 2018: Fischer lends us nuanced ways of thinking about faith and fakes, secular shamans and sexual misconduct, deceit and devotion.” —Los Angeles Review of Books



 


“BK Fischer is ‘our lady’ of the suburban neighborhood with streets named after famous poets—Keats, Spenser, Sidney, Pope. In the course of the book, and particularly through a series of poems whose titles begin ‘Our Lady of,’ Fischer creates characters and paints zones of the American landscape evoking the nostalgia, dread, and abuses we recognize and fear. Amidst the swirling, radioactive decay of curling irons, ear-piercing guns, Keds, and the word ‘slut’ Sharpied on a school locker, Radioapocrypha brilliantly tells the story of community, young adulthood, and the complexities of sexuality in American culture.” —Sandra Simonds


“BK Fischer’s Radioapocrypha is a revelation. Maybe that’s the easy and obvious thing to say about a book that retells the Gospel and situates it in America in 1989? But the revelation here isn’t, or isn’t just, the revelation one might expect from such a book—it’s the revelation of Fischer’s own skill as a poet as the story gains momentum and matches the intensity of the source material. I wouldn’t have thought anybody could pull that off, let alone so well. Not only is Radioapocrypha a revelation, it is a miracle.” —Shane McCrae


​ “Fischer produces a work as smart, satisfying, and nuanced in its climax as it is as a whole.” —Publisher's Weekly

From the Publisher