{"title":"Zefyr Lisowski","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"blood-box-book-zefyr-lisowski-9781625578266","title":"Blood Box","description":"Poetry. LGBTQIA Studies. BLOOD BOX, the deliciously haunting debut short collection from poet Zefyr Lisowski, takes us inside the infamous 1892 axe murders of Abby and Andrew Borden through twenty-six wide-ranging, stylistically experimental persona poems. Lisowski re-introduces us to mythologized spinster Lizzie Borden as we've never seen her before: a girl wielding an axe, yes, but also a girl trapped  in the boxes of age, of hunger, of loneliness, of blame. Lizzie, who was acquitted of the double murder of her father and stepmother, yet continues to haunt our cultural psyche over a hundred years later. Even now, Violence dances with us like ghosts. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn these pages, the notorious crime and its cast of characters serve as a jumping-off point for a textured exploration of inherited violence, queer intimacy, and the way family can be another geometry, another violence too. BLOOD BOX is Lizzie's story, but it's also the story of grief, of selfhood, of trans and queer becoming. Lisowski's Lizzie Borden is as sweet, sad, spooky, and haunted as a girl with an axe ever can be. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIf it is possible to queer a murder, Lisowski does it here, wearing the persona mask of Lizzie Borden, the familiar familicidal subject of too many jokes and skipping rhymes. Swinging non-chronologically from branch to blood-stained branch through the convoluted and uncertain history of the Borden murders, Lisowski discovers a kind of friend in Lizzie. These poems, sometimes quiet and demure, sometimes sung confession, sometimes full of hot desire. Each poem a pear, uniquely flavored, hanging barely from a tree in the balmy wet air of a New England summer. Inventive, sexy, self-aware to an almost dangerous degree, Lisowski applies layer after layer of powder foundation, demanding: 'Look at me: I wear \/ my suffering on my skin. I wear my skin \/ on top of my other skin.'  Chase Berggrun \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eZefyr Lisowski's BLOOD BOX is as much ouroboros as box, employing a circular structure to revisit the famous Fall River murders from alternating perspectives. Bookended by Lizzie Borden's voice, the collection shimmers with uncanniness as Lisowski channels the dead. The result is an exquisitely constructed danse macabre that shifts between reportage and invention, avowal and disavowal  an assembly of voices tethered together by a grisly loss. Moving us between the ghastliness of a father who 'twisted the heads off pigeons' to the radiant beauty of a 'pear tree's bright plumage, ' BLOOD BOX is disturbing, dazzling, and riveting.  Simone Muench \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eZefyr Lisowski's BLOOD BOX fearlessly excavates the secret and multiple lives (longings and regrets) of Lizzie Borden and her family. Mysterious and evocative, terrifying and tender, this is a powerful voice singing praise and elegy within the same breath, pressing against the world's constraints to dream flight.  Ching-In Chen \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eDealing in secrets, Zefyr Lisowski's BLOOD BOX stands at the threshold of a violent domestic silence. Unknowability generates a hybrid text of multiple methodologies, all of which circle around its empty center. Lisowski writes, 'The God I know \/ lives behind a locked door, and only hoards \/ His good things. If He has children, \/ He beats them without fail. If He has neighbors, \/ He chops apart their houses. Tell me, \/ who wouldn  (TM)t believe.' The fear that characterizes coloniality haunts the Borden family, trapping them in a labyrinthian coffin, where death generates death in a way that is neither spectacular nor foreign. The brilliance of this text lies in its guilty blood, housed in grayscape littered with the familial.  Raquel Salas Rivera","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49597188374801,"sku":"GOR013139699","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50385740857617,"sku":"CIN1625578261A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1625578261.jpg?v=1751277354"},{"product_id":"girl-work-book-zefyr-lisowski-9781955992046","title":"Girl Work","description":"\u003cp\u003eWINER OF THE 2022 NOEMI PRES BOK AWARD IN POETRY\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eGIRL WORK, a book-length meditation on sexual violence and feminized labor, centers hybrid-form and prose poems exploring haunting, labor, sexual trauma, and the assertion of a gender- nonconforming self in our current political moment. Written in injunctions to the self, to past assailants, and to friends, GIRL WORK challenges canonical representations of pain as punitive, redemptive, or separable from the environmental conditions it springs from. Throughout GIRL WORK, a self is restored from the detritus of memory--flashes of sexual violence, pop cultural touchstones like the movie The Ring, the music of Ke$ha, the sudden death of a father, the paintings of Henry Darger, and more. Winner of the 2022 Book Award from Noemi Press.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50860271927569,"sku":"CIN1955992045G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51059491438865,"sku":"NIN9781955992046","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1955992045.jpg?v=1750727498"},{"product_id":"uncanny-valley-girls-book-zefyr-lisowski-9780063413993","title":"Uncanny Valley Girls","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFINALIST FOR THE 2026 LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD FOR TRANSGENDER NONFICTION\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eAn \u003ci\u003eElectric Literature\u003c\/i\u003e Best Nonfiction Book of the Year * A \u003ci\u003ethem\u003c\/i\u003e Best LGBTQ+ Book of the Year * A \u003ci\u003eLiterary Hub\u003c\/i\u003e Most Anticipated Book of the Year * An Autostraddle Most Anticipated October Read * A \u003ci\u003eBookRiot\u003c\/i\u003e Most Anticipated Queer Book of the Year\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"In these extraordinary essays, Lisowski reads the entrails of her life like a witch and invites you along for the ride. How could you say no?\"\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003e--\u003c\/i\u003eCarmen Maria Machado\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eFrom Lambda Award-winning poet Zefyr Lisowski, a sharply personal and expansive memoir-in-essays dedicated to the strange and absurd beauty of horror films, exploring the complications of gender, the insidiousness of class ascension, and the latent violence hidden in our own uncanny reflections.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis is how it worked: first I loved them, and then I loved myself.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAt twenty-seven, poet Zefyr Lisowski found herself in the place she feared most: a locked psych ward. While inside, she turned to horror movies--her deepest, most constant comfort.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eRather than disturb, scary movies have always provided solace and connection for Lisowski, as they do many others--offering a vision of a world filled equally with beauty and pain, and a reason to reach out to others and hold them tight. After all, as Lisowski argues, what terrifies us most about these movies is our own uncanny reflection--and at the root of that fear, a desperate desire to love and be loved.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn these wide-ranging essays, Lisowski weaves theory and memoir into nuanced critiques of films such as \u003ci\u003eThe Texas Chain Saw Massacre\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eSaint Maud.\u003c\/i\u003e From fears about sickness and disability, to trans narratives and the predator\/victim complex, to the struggle to live in a world that wants you dead, she explores horror's reciprocal impact on our culture and--by extension--our lives. Through it all, Lisowski lays bare her own complex biography--spanning from a trans childhood in the South to the sweaty dancefloors of Brooklyn--and the family, friends, and lovers that have bloomed with her into the present.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDeeply felt, blood-spattered, and brimming with care and wonder, \u003ci\u003eUncanny Valley Girls\u003c\/i\u003e thrusts this seasoned poet to centerstage.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52494810808593,"sku":"NIN9780063413993","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52598305292561,"sku":"CIN006341399XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52701482746129,"sku":"CIN006341399XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780063413993.jpg?v=1760002359"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-zefyr-lisowski.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}