Collected in this volume are Chelsey Minnis’s first two books: Zirconia (winner of the Alberta Prize) and Bad Bad.
This volume features a foreword by Ariana Reines, in which she says “[Zirconia………Bad Bad] is a beveled, shattered, mosaic experience of ‘what it feels like in the moment’ and ‘what it would feel like’ and ‘what it felt like,’ in short an experience of the present that feels Steinian in its smoothie of idiocy and perspicacity, which is what the ego really feels like, an idiot child, curious and desiring, briskly disgusted and peculiar, moving on to the next thing.”
Zirconia introduced a speaker described as “half-smirking, half-weeping” by the Village Voice. Minnis heralded the gurlesque, a term coined for the occasion and defined as “a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy.”
Bad Bad ushers Zirconia’s juvenile persona into unblushing womanhood. The poems are equally clownish and fuck-offish, taking on with equivocal weightlessness the lexicons and trimmings of fashion, as it applies to the Self and the garments that clothe the Self, and self-obliteration. Minnis addresses the inner needs of the poet—“the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist.”
