Dismantling the Rabbit Altar

Poetry. "Natasha Kessler's DISMANTLING THE RABBIT ALTAR resides deep in the uncanny forest of the unconscious—among the decaying vestiges of a crumbling industrialization, in which myth is rebirthed as a burning paper bird. In these uneasily unraveling fairy-tale tableaus, the spells and remedies of wolf heads, apples, and mockingbirds mask the faceless woundedness of 'bound things trembl[ing] on a counter,' 'something shaking in the corner,' or 'dismantled mannequins in the orchard.' Read these fierce and remarkable poems as incantatory talismans. Wear these tenderly feral poems about your waist and neck as toothy fetish."—Lee Ann Roripaugh

"This is a book you enter, warm and its ceilings low. Dimly lit, a metallic taste on the tongue, though there are tunnels whereby you might exit into strange forests and wide clearings, into rooms of human habitation, and rooms wherein the inhabitants have hung the walls, their animal faces. It's got Plath's roses and soft rugs. I thought I knew what there was to know about the way humans breed at the expense of rabbits, and as vulnerably. I thought I knew from wolves. Natasha Kessler knows better."—Danielle Pafunda

"'My folklore is misbehaving,' says Natasha Kessler, 'I don't want hand-me-down children. / I want bleeding melons in a wagon.' In this dairy of a hunger artist cum carnie, the coy, diminutive, ultra-femme world of mothers, wolves, milk, and 'num num soup bones' torques into quasi-Sadeian escapade in which lovers' bodies are turned into swans and mounted on walls and rabbits are buried in children's faces. A testament to the carnal need of narrative to exploit bodies (and vice versa)—'before story hour, we feed the weakest to the weak'—this book (which may or may not be dedicated to Sleeping Beauty) slyly semaphores that those flesh-gobbling briars may actually be occult vehicles of pleasure, and the time-clogged kingdom is totally crushed out on its knocked-out victims. In Kessler's hands, our eyes are eggs that give birth every time we blink, and despite (or because) of this, 'Right on time, the dreaming machines catch fire.'"—Lara Glenum