The wonderful short of it: Slash Pine Press is pleased to announce the release of our first chapbook of poems, Juliet Cook’s dynamically gut-wrenching, Fondant Pig Angst. Juliet’s voice is an American original, fusing pastry with grotesquerie, icing with amputation. These poems are not plainly “dark”. No, they are alive and electric and full of verve and spunk, playfulness even, and it’s these competing impulses that make for such an amazing collection of poems.
Grindhouse with a genuine felicity for line. Think Fleur du Mal with content no longer Interview with a Vampire but Blood-Sucking Freaks. Think syphilitic pigeons, baby spiders and their “toxic pearl shaped eggs”, opened pigs, farm implements, holes that birth peccaries, and dolls, so many uses for dolls. And always those pitch-perfect lines, Cook’s artistry that is the real knife here, the thing that cuts us to pieces. “Screw me here. No I meant with metal screws”. When my childhood friends and I wandered the Ohio cornfields at night, this is what we were afraid of. And what, of course, we were secretly longing to find.
–Charles Freeland, author of Through the Funeral Mountains on a Burro
Fondant Pig Angst is a macabre buffet with “pantiliners in the stew pot” and “candied brain stems;” where “a meat hook is [a] lifeline.” Relentlessly chopping, whirring, and ramming, Cook’s poems force feed their “horripilation all over [the] inner thighs.” These gurlesque confection-bodies are “a new breed of sticky,” and once they manhandle you, you will never get the gurl-gunk gone.
–Kate Durbin, author of The Ravenous Audience
Please allow 2-4 weeks for delivery. You can use the PayPal button below and order online or you can send us a check for $5 and a sheet with your name, address, and email to:
Slash Pine Projects
Dept. of English
University of Alabama
PO Box 870244
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0244