Material Girl

Poetry. "The experience of MATERIAL GIRL begins in a field of distinct flowers—poems are 'the flowers of associational thinking,' as Charles Bernstein teaches—each composition held in its own light, which it produces. Can the experiment 'express our peasant sufferings'? Can the beauty of the language be made to make things clear? 'Material Girl' and MATERIAL GIRL abide in and arise from these questions, inhabiting them, moving through them, to the point of noticing, transmitting, 'the nation's wild flowers bow gently // around our waists in the open.' If the thing is that we have to learn how both to inhabit and escape, adore and destroy—well, now I feel sure that this is the thing, because this is what Laura Jaramillo teaches."—Fred Moten "Negative Ecstasy. She said it herself and it's true. Laura Jaramillo's poems are just short of too smart. Meaning they are too real to critique. Cascading ('jism from the cock of a cartoon') they (shake-shake) are it."—Eileen Myles "Before Madonna was Monroe, before Monroe, Mina Loy, before Mina Loy, was Laura Jaramillo, who crosscuts a multitude of materialities so that a girl will appear, abject, yet a star, a girl who lives in Italian movies and in Queens, who, knowing her Adorno, is as well a materialist girl, a dazzling embodiment of critical thought and purest longing, awakening to life in and away from the city. True, as she intimates, Manhattan may not exist, but the romance of it lives on in every lyrical, sharp-eyed, exhilarating, witty, and sad line of this marvelous book. Reader, beware: Laura Jaramillo will make you miss New York so much it hurts, even if, especially if, you've never been there."—Joseph Donahue