Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence
Poems
by Alexus Erin
Cartoon characters are routinely tossed off cliffs, shot, exploded, have their limbs thrown about. They return for the next episode intact. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is a meditation on being a creator while feeling utterly like a caricature—a cartoon, an exaggeration, an actualization of a metaphor. Through the politics of the personal, examining memory, desire, grief, faith, and love, these poems are a disembodiment sermon, the frantic gathering of memory before confabulation or gaslighting. They are wishes; howls in love’s name. They are considerations of the separation between lived experience and the witness, even as they inhabit the same body, illustrating the unreality of depression, the whir and fragmentation of constant analysis. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is about the process of mistaking people for cartoons, of making fortitude limitless, here, at a point in our collective history, where we seem to be calling for change in the unjust and systemic mistreatment of Black people, who have always been expected to pick up their broken pieces and try again. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence is the moment before the anvil falls from its midair suspension; the roadrunner running out of road; the thin line between the phenomenology of the real and a vaguely familiar Tooniverse.
Cartoon Logic
Tell me what you want to celebrate.
There is the truth, and then a pedestrian truth
as primetime. I am suspicious we all still have our milk teeth,
in love, projecting a line of best fit
on the wall of the family room like a second-rate silver screen.
There is a commercial for a new
sports drink—
“Parallax”: Now you too can exist
More real in contexts of usefulness, less in parallel trajectory.
Now you too can practice daily sensualities
as an antidote to nihilistic despair. You too can passively disregard the link
between fear and desire, the defiant power in joy,
the way Talk is laughably cheap—
Talk, with his piña colada, is crooning some ditty he made up,
stretched on the Baby Grand like a calico cat.
He is red in the face of a Mexico sun, breath too sweet,
vowels long—a drawl I cannot pin to any specific location.
I pace, a few feet away, small and grim
Already begging for creature comforts in the afterlife.
Is this grief, or a parade? A postcard with the image
of a big snail in a tiny wooden boat, hovering ominously above the sea?
Is it a nightmare only real people get to have?
In another world, my thighs are made of pixels—
their outline astigmatic. I am coming to Time Warner Cable this fall—animated
Much better with smaller, daily gestures:
telephone voice, design accent, hem length, eating,
tokens of affection.
We can watch; dim at first, then
hopefully, face to face
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alexus Erin is an American poet, performer, and Ph.D. candidate living in the UK. Her poetry has previously appeared in Potluck Magazine, The Melanin Collective, The Nervous Breakdown, The Audacity, American Society of Young Poets, God Is in the TV, LEVELER, Red Flag Poetry, Silk + Smoke, and a host of other publications. She is the author of two chapbooks: Two Birds, All Moon (Gap Riot Press, 2019) and St. John’s Wort (Animal Heart Press, 2019). Alexus Erin has been the 2018 Poetry Fellow of the Leopardi Writers Conference, a performer at Edinburgh Fringe Festival, a certified doula, and emo enthusiast.
PRAISE FOR CARTOON LOGIC, CARTOON VIOLENCE
“Every single poem in Alexus Erin’s Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erin’s full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into love—this is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asides—it will make you hungry.”
“n Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality’s patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much more—a giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky.”
“In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker’s voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life.”
“Alexus Erin’s words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erin’s poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erin’s words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric.”
“Alexus Erin knows there is a ‘tide to turn’ — these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence investigates the complexity of life at the intersections: between Blackness and being “wholly and entirely a woman,” between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hang there — ‘gravity negated by fear’ — all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. ‘How else does one encounter the God / question?’ Truly, an expansive work.”
Book Details
Title: Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence
Author: Alexus Erin
Publication Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-936097-39-5
$16.95
Dist. by Publishers Group West
www.pgw.com, 800-788-2123
Available at your favorite local bookstore, on indiebound.org, bookshop.org, or from Baobab Press affiliate Sundance Books and Music .
