Sex Augury

"Sex Augury stirs an acid cauldron of documentary poetics, political theater, and surrealist wound-scape sprinkled with the salt of Lautreamont, Bataille, Nin, Carrington, Plath. Setting flame to “the buckling wall between myself and myself,” Bain leads us through an underworld of our own making, where pleasure and war are a TV channel apart, where the heart eats you alive, where “they bombed a restaurant / we bombed a hospital,” where desire courts death, and rape scars each face. The circles of this hell are forged in the fires of sexual violence, yet they ring out in yearning. In a voice akin to Medea’s, the poet asks how to “live with the violences I’ve chosen,” how to love when “every tool of love / is a weapon too”? The answer glimmers in the ecstatic gaze, in the poems’ intimate knowledge of their suffering bodies which bind us page after page to visceral metamorphoses in close-up—“my mouth on her rough incisors / against the reptile crevice / where an ear begins to bloom.” —Matvei Yankelevich, author of Dead Winter ""C. Bain’s highly anticipated second collection, Sex Augury, courts an honest darkness and charts new mythologies out of the old with a quality of attention unique to the rich particulars of this poet’s gaze. The book asks the reader to look and to look and to not look away. The poems in Sex Augury articulate a brutal investigation of the self, of the inherited violences of gender, language, whiteness, and medicalization—the erotic, the cruel, and the divine braid and unbraid as the speaker moves us through his world."" —Sam Sax, author of Pig"