Spectacle, Now Available!
from Panhandler Books
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In Spectacle, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter’s second full-length collection, the poet deepens her commitment to the enduring and eternal subjects of womanhood, motherhood, and family, and deftly considers how those devotions intersect in ways joyful, mysterious, and cruel within personal and political landscapes. Slaughter’s poems seek out and explore authentic, raw humanity, at times employing the gaze of Dutch photographer and artist, Rineke Dijkstra—several of whose photographic portraits are included in the collection alongside ekphrastic poems—as a lens to view what Dijkstra calls the “uninhibited moment.” When artistic eye meets the fierceness of subject, the result is poetry deeply rooted in its lyricism and empathy, grounded in its depth of emotion, and unflinching in its alertness to the poet’s beloveds and world.
“Spectacle starts with the eye—the dead moth’s eyespot, the photographer’s eye behind the lens, the anxious eye of the mother watching through a door, who tries, impossibly, to translate the “ghost forest” of grief through which her children must move” — Jenny Molberg author of Refusal
“If there was ever a book that spoke to this era, it is this one. ” —Charlotte Pence, author of Code
Alice the Corpse Flower
“The corpse flower, or titan arum (Amorphophallus titanum), is native to the rainforests of Indonesia. In bloom, it is known for its size, stench, and beauty. . . .A corpse flower in bloom is rare, both in the wild and in the world of horticulture. At botanic gardens and arboreta around the world, titan arums have only recently been coaxed into bloom after ten or more years of careful cultivation. “