The End of Pink

by Kathryn Nuernberger

Overview

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters—Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin—all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and—of course—joy.

Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation,
before me appeared Benjamin Franklin,
who magnetized his French paramours
at dinner parties as an amusing diversion
from his most serious studies of electricity
and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about
how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss
their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp
and clap for the blue spark between them.
I believe in an honest and forthright manner,
a democracy of plain speech, so I have to
find a way to explain I don't care to have sex anymore.

Kathryn Nuernberger has lived in various corners of Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana. Her first book, Rag & Bone (Elixir Press, 2011), was a love letter to backwoods junk collectors and all of the abandoned cabins in the foothills to the Ozark Mountains. An unapologetic dilettante, she has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and The Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life to research aspects of the history of science and medicine. She currently lives in Columbia, Missouri, teaches at the University of Central Missouri, and serves as the director of Pleiades Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683148
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Series:	American Poets Continuum
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of Rag & Bone, which won the 2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. She has received research grants from the American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

Table of Contents

The Symbolical Head (1883) as When Was the Last Time? 11

More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769) 13

Zoontological Sublime 16

About Derrick, If You're into That 20

Bat Boy Washed Up Onshore 23

Benjamin Harding to Prospective Investors on the Refining Effects of Static Electricity and Volcanic Action in the Ultimate Production of Both Atomic (or Molecular) and FREE Pure Metallic Gold (1838) 25

Testimonial (1888) 27

P. T. Barnum's Fiji Mermaid Exhibition as I Was Not the Girl I Think I Was 29

I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point 31

Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magnetism Displayed (1791) as What I Want Is 33

Rituals of the Bacabs as the Strange Case of Kate Abbott 35

Birds of Ohio 37

Reading Drops of Water: Showing the Mysteries of the Visible World (1873) as Love Poem 38

The Book of Knowledge, the Experienced Farrier, &c. (1793) as The Best of All Possible Worlds 40

The End of Pink 42

The Saint Girl's Sweetest Tortures 47

The Saint Girl Died and Went to Heaven and That Was One Problem After Another 48

Ways in Which the Saint Girl Is and Is Not Me; Also, So What If She Is and What If She Isn't 49

The Saint Girl Discovers an Orgasmitron 50

The Saint Girt Tries to Do the Right Thing 51

The Saint Girl's Isochronal Error 52

The Saint Girl Takes in Strays 53

The Saint Girl Opens the Window and Closes It as She Pleases 54

The Nimbuses of Devils 55

Or Perhaps Not 59

My First Peacock 60

Property Lines 61

When Cortez Came 63

My Peacock Among the Phantasmagoria 64

Whatever You Need 67

Little Brown Jug, Look on the Bright Side 69

Toad 71

My Peacock's Daguerreotype 73

Peter, Raised by Wolves (1726) 75

René Descartes and the Clockwork Girl 78

Peacock and Sister 81

Little Lesson on How to Be 82

Acknowledgments 85

About the Author 87

Colophon 92

Editorial Reviews

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award

“The remarkable designs of a landscape created by Kathryn Nuernberger give us such a stamp of hoof, wonder, and wit—so much wisdom and understanding of what it means to truly fling your body into the world. This is an unforgettable collection of sly-sexy poems of desire, grief, and motherhood, finally offering up the ‘truth of it, the refracted light and blooming anemones of it, the red / coral and unfurling starfish of it.’ But perhaps the greatest gift from The End of Pink is the insistence of ‘how very emerald joy is, how very leafed with lapis and gilding’—a passionate aide-mémoire to hold off a surrender to the dark.”

—Aimee Nezhukumatathil

“I love the ways in which The End of Pink confronts the idea of wisdom, and deftly deconstructs it. When is fable and myth more accurate than science? When does graybearded public authority submit to the wisdom of messy, private experience? How does the wisdom of the book measure up against the wisdom of the body—the female body especially? What do we do when our everyday language fails to represent reality? Poetry, of course, is the answer to this last question, and it is the poetry of Kathryn Nuernberger in particular that makes a place for us in our uncertainty. Not a safe place, not a place of comfort, but a place of surreal, dark beauty that knows us all the same.”

—Nicky Beer

"This a collection of extraordinary resolve, a book that works through emotional turmoil with a steadfast earnestness that resists privatizing pain at the same time it refuses to make something clever or ostentatious with it. The result is a refreshing innovation on the confessional that reads as easily as a conversation with a friend over a drink while still surprising us with new connections, illuminations, and affecting enactments of psychological healing."

— NewPages

From the Publisher