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"It’s no accident that some of these poems reference Edward Hopper. Rigby’s language evokes his sparse, barren landscapes where emptiness is tangible, menacing, and beautiful. Her poems are so packed they bloom at the touch.
The results are stunning."

Jim Daniels

ABOUT: Forthcoming this September, Savage Machinery is a chapbook exploring 15th and mid-century art, eros, women, and the pleasures of taste.

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Bathing in the Burned House
Design for a Flying Machine
Flyover Country
Cebolla Church
Photo of an Autoerotic
Verité
Norma Desmond Descending
   the Staircase as Salome
Sleeping on Buses
Edward Hopper's Women
Petrol
Song for the Onion
Borscht
Bread
The Story of Adam and Eve
Plums
Shroud of Turin

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“In Karen Rigby's poems we are in a world far from innocence. We are, in fact, in the "savage machinery" of the world after the fall, a world stricken with beauty and flaw. Whether writing about the "heart's declensions" in the voice of Norma Desmond, or about the "multiple selves" of the onion, or the "dumb abandonment" of Da Vinci's flying machine, Rigby's poems negotiate the balance between wonder and woundedness. Rigby's eye is phenomenally attuned to everything it sees, and even past what's seen, to the "rooms behind / the ones you know." The poems are vividly strange, and utterly heartbreaking.”


Rick Barot, author of Want
and The Darker Fall


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“The poems of Savage Machinery are driven by both a keen sense of rhythm and a confident announcement of Rigby's metaphoric visions of the world. ‘The pure, explosive signature’ of her poetry aspires toward Blake's admonition to ‘see not with but thro the eye,’ and because of this imaginative ambition (conveyed with music and grace), the poems reveal a vivid sensual world that seems both wholly familiar and holy strange. Simply, a stunning chapbook”.


Tod Marshall, author of Dare Say

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ISBN 978-1-59924-287-3
ISBN 1-59924-287-7

Painting: "Sacrificial Grace"
Makoto Fujimura

Finishing Line Press
Post Office Box 1626
Georgetown, KY 40324

PRE-ORDER HERE.

Free Shipping July 17-August 29

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Reviews

Forthcoming:

 
The Adirondack Review
Burst
Cold Front Magazine
Corduroy Books
The Del Sol Review
Erudition Online
Estella's Book Revenge

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