Advance Praise

Yes, Fabulosa: where “poems arrive wearing black gloves,” then “jump speed rope,” “refuse daylight,” and “end on fire.” Here, couture rhymes with futur because these poems know why Dior’s “wasp-waist” and the Doomsday clock debut together. Karen Rigby reminds us that whether writing or reading a poem, we are “doing what history warns us / not to, inserting myself // in the frame.” Wear black gloves, jump speed rope: read these poems and find how “the brute song housed / in the chest finds a way out.”

—Angie Estes

Karen Rigby’s lush, restless poems somersault dazzlingly between the world’s myriad surfaces and the shadowy interiors of heart and mind. In Fabulosa, her gorgeous second collection, Rigby’s voracious intelligence snares on everything from an Oscar dress to police procedurals to bougainvillea ramping over a chain link fence. I’m in awe of these poems, already possessed of such knowledge yet always hungry for more.

—Kasey Jueds

Enter Fabulosa as you would step into a film noir, with fascination and apprehension. In Karen Rigby’s extraordinary new book, poems wear a “river of black beads // down a backwards V-dress.” They peel down black evening gloves and “hunt shadow in the folds.” They smell of lemons in the desert and “new blood.” These poems blaze with history and private anguish against a twilight backdrop. You leave Fabulosa feeling like a jewel thief who has pulled off the crime of the century. A victory of deftly executed spins and fistfuls of diamonds.

—Sharon Suzuki-Martinez