Blood Box

Zefyr Lisowski

If it is possible to queer a murder, Lisowski does it here, wearing the persona mask of Lizzie Borden, the familiar familicidal subject of too many jokes and skipping rhymes. Swinging non-chronologically from branch to blood-stained branch through the convoluted and uncertain history of the Borden murders, Lisowski discovers a kind of friend in Lizzie. These poems, sometimes quiet and demure, sometimes sung confession, sometimes full of hot desire. Each poem a pear, uniquely flavored, hanging barely from a tree in the balmy wet air of a New England summer. Inventive, sexy, self-aware to an almost dangerous degree, Lisowski applies layer after layer of powder foundation, demanding: “Look at me: I wear / my suffering on my skin. I wear my skin / on top of my other skin.”

—Chase Berggrun, author of R E D