Bad Bad

by Chelsey Minnis

Overview

"Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both, are the themes of [Chelsey] Minnis's second collection."—Publishers Weekly

"Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger."—Arielle Greenberg

"Her poems take some getting used to."—Robert Strong

"Many won't find her . . . acceptable at all...—Cole Swensen

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780977106493
Publisher:	Fence Magazine, Incorporated
Publication date:	04/01/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	123
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002), Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007), Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), and Baby, I don't care (Wave Books, 2018), She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.

Read an Excerpt

Preface 1

People say “nothing new” or “the death of the author” but, I am new and I am not dead.

Intellectual, anachronistic, superserious: I’m not going to start crying because “experimental” and I’m not going to start crying because “not experimental”...

I just want to piss down my own leg...

And should everyone be bored like narcosis?....

Poetry should be “uh huh” like...“baby has to have it...”

If anyone thinks they need to write reviews, teach classes, edit magazines, or translate

books in order to write good poetry...then maybe they should just take a rest from it... 

If you try to write a good poem again and again for years and years and receive no awards, no money, no nothing...then you’re happy...

And all these blurbs are for s—. Like if I were to carry around a turd and pretend it is my baby...

The poet I worship is Edward Dorn, because I adore his disgust...

Whatever he says feels like art...

Poetry is for crap since there’s no money or fast cars in it...

But, in the thighs...I feel it...

Preface 2

You should not think of getting a job with your poetry...

If you do, then you will begin to count your own books...

Poetry careers are a bad business...

If you want to be hired then you will write the right poems for it...

I would like to write this for people...who don’t know anything...

I don’t want to hurt their pretty heads with poems!…

What People are Saying About This

Arielle Greenberg

"...indulgent and melancholy...
...moments of extreme morbidity and anger..."

Editorial Reviews

"Like Liberace, it’s so bad, it’s good, and it works its reverse psychology on the reader almost immediately. Underneath its Metallica typeface and juvenile hearts, Bad Bad chronicles a love-hate relationship with American poetry and the academic universe in which it too often resides...From the sixty-eight prefaces that begin the book to the 'Anti-Vitae' in which years are marked by rejected grant applications, unpublished poems, and critiques of her work by future poet laureates, Minnis uses the Master’s tools to dismantle the Master’s house. Moreover, she throws a new wrench into the toolbox. After the prefaces, which are made up of statements split both mid-line and end-line by a traditional use of ellipsis, Minnis returns to the extended ellipses that punctuate her first book, Zirconia. Hesitation, resolution, omission, inclusion, decoration, and punctuation, the ellipses are...the bullet-holes that remain after Minnis’s speaker takes shots at the reader."
—Sasha Steensen, The Boston Review

“I had a necklace made that says BAD BAD, bought five copies of that book…”
—Ann Key, The Poetry Society UK News

“Her body of work—spanning five books—is irreverent, darkly humorous, and bitingly seductive, often mimicked, and still, entirely distinct…In her words, she writes “aggro” poems, and yet, is something of an enigma…Her work gets passed on by word of mouth. Cultish fandom ensues.”
—Ana Cecilia Alvarez, affidavit

From the Publisher