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Kristin Prevallet. Selections from The Parasite Poems.

Mixing media has led Prevallet to a tremulous decree. Finding fragments from local news and cosmological journals, finding them comic or terrifying, she offers three simultaneous comments on localized oddities - hers, the digest's mystery, the citation's brutal brevity. Her parasites prey on selfhood and nationhood, parodying concern, prompting meditations like fainting fits that vindicate critical attachment to their odd locale.

1-903488-10-9. 1999. 32 pp. OUT OF PRINT

HUMAN BODY USED FOR AMMUNITION

In ghostland I am a swallow

without a breed
born one morning when
the wound on your thigh
took over your mind
and glassy was your eye
your temple by the see.
A silver plate, a rejected alien
seen by your blood as an intruder
too vast to blink the milky way
streaked and smudged the interior.

_________________________________

We are immune to penicillin.
The plant that grows from cracks in sidewalks is called "tree-of-heaven" and it is tough because it is immune to its own toxin.
Anabiotic means alive but inactive, like suspended animation.
The body might not reject harvested pig organs.

1 (Greenville News, 12-23-97).
2 "Exotic-Looking Microbes Turn Up in Ancient Antarctic Ice," (NASA Space Science Features, 3-18-98).
3 (Reuters, 8-5-98).

Also by Kristin Prevallet:

Lead, Glass and Poppy. (Washington, DC: Primitive Publications, 1996); 28 for the Road (Buffalo: Meow Press, c1996); Country of Magic : (after Michaux). (Buffalo, NY: Buffalo Vortex, c1995); From Perturbation, My Sister: (a study of Max Ernst's Hundred headless woman). (Buffalo, NY: Leave Books, c1994). Read selections from other works by Prevallet, including an extract from her groundbreaking research on Helen Adams, at her EPC page: http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/prevallet/.

Links

Kristin Prevallet's website

A new project: Material World
 

'Brooklyn-based Kristin Prevallet, best known as one of the four editors of apex of the M, has done more than any other poet in recent years to further the practice of poetic collage... The poem evokes at once the personified world of Oz and the biocentric perspective of an Edward Abbey - an enjoyable hybrid, even for those who like their grunge and love their leather jackets... Capitalizing on the daily paper's daily nonsense - the very measure of meaningfulness for some--Prevallet finds profit in the often bankrupt practice of "cut-up"....' -- from the review of Selections from The Parasite Poems by Dirk Jefferson at Lagniappe.