Crisis Chronicles Press is delighted to announce the publication of glitter witch Juliet Cook's new darkly delicious full-length poetry collection, Malformed Confetti, on 16 October 2018.
All
hail the Queen of Grotesque, Juliet Cook! Her imagery is monstrous, distorted
and unnatural — an unmistakably unstable mixture of estranged dollcanos and blood. These poems plunge
into “your neckline, your mouth, your eyes”— into the absurdities of existence,
and Cook can barely contain all that is coming apart, even “a stuck tongue
keeps breaking.” Malformed Confetti
is alive! And absolutely “plotting an insurrection.”
—Susan
Yount, editor of Arsenic Lobster Poetry Journal
Juliet Cook’s full-length collection, Malformed Confetti, is a visceral examination of the body: bones, blood, teeth, breasts, ovaries, eyes, throat and thighs. Cook’s poetry is elemental grindhouse feminism; confronting what is most difficult with the unblinking eyes of a coroner. Lush and guttural, Cook leads us on a journey through a harrowing cycle of creation and destruction.
—Kelly Boyker, author of Zoonosis and Poetry Editor at Menacing Hedge
In
her second full-length collection of poetry, Juliet Cook offers up a menagerie
of beaten, bloodied, insect infested, ink ingested, broken girl bits. Her words cut into the eyes with nettles and
burs, leaving nothing but an empty socket, a hole to be filled with desire
“rooted in sick compulsion.” Cook stares unflinchingly at the sugar and spice
and everything nice to reveal the dark nature of such malformed conceptions of
beauty and womanhood. Each graphic image
is threaded with the red yarn of things that are forbidden to say, so Cook
cracks the skull open as easily as the shell of an egg. She stares the darkest horrors of the mind
straight in the eye to say “Doesn’t mean I still can’t maneuver up. / Maybe I
just don’t want to / with you." Her poems in this collection leave the
reader dazzled by blue blood and dead birds made out of the vocabulary of what
it means to be a capital P Poet.
—Tracie
Morell, author of Matilda's Battle Waltz
Poetry
that devours you. That isn’t afraid to put its best twisted doll foot forward.
I like to read Juliet’s poetry in the buff because her words keep me modest as
I rail against the perversity of playing with shit and all the anorexic
nightmares that go along with it. Her pound cake poetry fits perfectly in your
misshapen pie hole. Swallow her words like a handful of blue-tinged tacks
because there’s no standing on ceremony in this land of ravenous parasites and
machinated halos. Her well-chosen and ill-fated albino words aren’t afraid to
get their hands dirty as the maggots begin singing an emaciated melody and
there’s nothing left but her Tilt-O-Whirl porno star mannerisms. This
collection of Malformed Confetti will leave you in traction as it’s rolled
fresh from the oven and acts as a tranquilizer or dark red cloud burst
depending on your dissolution or poisoned discord and how prepared you are to
walk into the silently screaming fires.
—Charles
Cicirella, co-author of Ether Bisque
In Malformed Confetti, Juliet Cook conveys both a rare elegance and grotesque violence simultaneously. This book is
unafraid; it is not ashamed. It takes unabashed risks, and turns language into
something that is breathing, and alive with vigor. In this landscape of “secret
luminarias” the body is devoured like food, and her “tongue unroots from its
dank cave”; “bones are tapered syllables” and “hollow flutes.” There is a
vulnerability embedded in the anger and gore, and though some may say we are
“forbidden to talk about hunger,” Cook speaks of it fearless of her
rivals.
—Lisa
M. Cole, author of Dreams of the Living
and Heart Full of Tinders
 |
| Juliet Cook [photo by Darryl Shupe, processed by Cook] |
Juliet Cook has been writing poetry for more than
25 years. Her poetry has appeared in a small multitude of magazines, both
online and in print. She is the author of numerous poetry chapbooks, recently
including a collaboration with j/j hastain called "Dive Back Down"
(Dancing Girl Press, 2015), an individual collection called "From One
Ruined Human to Another" (Cringe-Worthy Poets Collective, 2018), and with
another individual collection, "Another Set of Ripped Out Bloody Pig
Tails" forthcoming from The Poet's Haven.
Cook's first full-length individual poetry book, Horrific Confection, was published by BlazeVOX in late 2008, ten years ago
now. Her more recent full-length poetry book, A Red Witch, Every Which
Way, is a collaboration with j/j hastain published by Hysterical Books in 2016.
Her MOST recent individual full-length poetry book is this one, Malformed
Confetti.
The poems within Malformed Confetti
range from 2008 to 2015. In early 2010, Cook suffered from an unexpected
Carotid Artery Dissection, which lead to an Aneurysm which lead to a Stroke.
Later in 2010, while on the brink of divorce and temporarily living with her
parents, Cook began to assemble and submit an earlier version of this
manuscript. As time went on, she revised it, added more recent poems, and
rearranged it, forming it into a dissected but interconnected discombobulation
of pre-stroke and post-stroke work.
Cook's poetic style has undergone changes over the
years, but her passion for poetry lives on.
Cook also sometimes creates semi-abstract painting
collage art hybrid creatures.
Cook also runs her own tiny independent press,
Blood Pudding Press, which sometimes publishes hand-designed poetry chapbooks
and sometimes sells art.
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