About the Book Collected in this volume are Chelsey Minniss first two books: Zirconia (winner of the Alberta Prize) and Bad Bad. Zirconia introduced a speaker described as half-smirking, half-weeping by the Village Voice. Minnis heralded the gurlesque, a term coined for the occasion and defined as a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy. This poets rapt, driven affect and glazed wit heralded a new strategy in the mitigation of female self-hatred in poetry. Book Synopsis Juvenile mockery of poetry and the American poetry establishment, as well as excited reverence for both...-- Publishers Weekly Decadent! Childish! . . . indulgent and melancholy . . . moments of extreme morbidity and anger.--Arielle Greenberg Collected in this volume are Chelsey Minniss first two books : Zirconia (winner of the Alberta Prize) and Bad Bad . Zirconia introduced a speaker described as half-smirking, half-weeping by the Village Voice . Minnis heralded the gurlesque, a term coined for the occasion and defined as a feminine, feminist incorporating of the grotesque and cruel with the spangled and dreamy. This poets rapt, driven affect and glazed wit heralded a new strategy in the mitigation of female self-hatred in poetry. Her poems take some getting used to.--Robert Strong Many wont find her . . . acceptable at all...--Cole Swensen Show Additional Fields Review Quotes I exist in a blister of fantasy, proclaims the narrator of this self-assured and often deeply satisfying debut. Similar in form, style, and rhetorical strategy, each of the poems in Zirconia is, in essence, an associative riff on a particular object (a tiger lily, a skull ring, the moon), or in some cases, a state of mind (grief, confusion, ecstasy). Minniss sharp-tongued, sexy, and somewhat juvenile narrator uses these obsessive, fetishistic examinations to both describe and insert the reader into a dream state--a kind of mythic consciousness, in which memory and desire transform the stuff of everyday life into charged symbols of, well, memory and desire. --Joanna Rakoff, Village Voice Literary Supplement The I here has backed off, veiling itself in the impersonal language of a research scientist, a dissociation whose completeness suggests another kind of violence. Yet we, too, get swept up in the minute consideration of sensual detail, focusing so closely that we lose track of the larger scene. But is it a losing track? Or is Minnis insisting on the reality of cells, of the specificity of real moments, refusing to let them get swallowed up by even the most sensational stories? Both, I think. And its also a mask for vulnerability. Minnis seems to recognize that her only defense against enormous fragility is to announce it everywhere, detail it, expose her weak spots, and defy the likelihood of attack. This vulnerability comes out in the candid voice that she uses throughout; its an almost impossibly innocent voice, but so flat that it never becomes coy. Instead, it gradually builds into a quietly nerve-wracking tension. When is this innocent going to realize the danger? --Cole Swensen, T The Boston Review In this sense, she offers direct mental transcriptions of her craving to be released from the now. Her poems are moments of decadent sexuality and unattainable fantasy, and they demonstrate what happens when the world consistently gets between us and what we want. Minniss world is a world of conspiracy. And shes gotten it right: In the end, we suspect everyones in on it but her. --John Erhardt, Rain Taxi The themes present in Zirconia --beauty, cruelty, other/daughterhood-as well as some of the recurring images-wings, fur, pearls--not to mention the title itself, with its tawdry, dreamy sparkle, led me back to the days of Stevie Nicks, pegasus suncatchers and Seventeen magazines prom issue. Minnis fearlessly mines this terrain for all its faux glamour and real heartbreak. The second poem in the book, Big Doves, starts off like the storyboard to a Bjork video--doves / are rolling out of my heart / and / just rolling out of my heart / and molten ice is twisting out of my heart like a frozen / drink--but eventually and gleefully escapes into pure wordlust, as if the narrator is luxuriating in a bath of consonants... --Arielle Greenberg Minnis effort is, in a word, brilliant, as the titular wink suggests. It is not, however, glaringly imitative, though the demonology it conjures is not unlike Sexton and Plaths...In the end, praise for Zirconia must end up in superlatives, though not the diamond-quality, knock-off variety the title ironically anticipates. Minnis is careful not to undersell her gift in this first collection, whose dazzling moments belong both to a wildchild improviser and a sage conductor. -- Zachary Jack Like Liberace, its so bad, its good, and it works its reverse psychology on the reader almost immediately. Underneath its Metallica typeface and juvenile hearts, Bad Bad chronicles a love-hate relationship with American poetry and the academic universe in which it too often resides...From the sixty-eight prefaces that begin the book to the Anti-Vitae in which years are marked by rejected grant applications, unpublished poems, and critiques of her work by future poet laureates, Minnis uses the Masters tools to dismantle the Masters house. Moreover, she throws a new wrench into the toolbox. After the prefaces, which are made up of statements split both mid-line and end-line by a traditional use of ellipsis, Minnis returns to the extended ellipses that punctuate her first book, Zirconia . Hesitation, resolution, omission, inclusion, decoration, and punctuation, the ellipses are...the bullet-holes that remain after Minniss speaker takes shots at the reader. --Sasha Steensen, T he Boston Review I had a necklace made that says BAD BAD, bought five copies of that book... --Ann Key, The Poetry Society UK News Her body of work--spanning five books--is irreverent, darkly humorous, and bitingly seductive, often mimicked, and still, entirely distinct...In her words, she writes aggro poems, and yet, is something of an enigma...Her work gets passed on by word of mouth. Cultish fandom ensues. --Ana Cecilia Alvarez, affidavit About the Author Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is the author of Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002), Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007), Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), and Baby, I dont care (Wave Books, 2018), She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.