I Eat Cannibals
Gina Abelkop
Fall 2014
REVIEWS
Galatea Resurrects "i eat cannibals by Gina Abelkop" by M. Earl Smith
The Conversant "Megan Milks with Gina Abelkop" Inter(re)view
The second collection from poet and Birds of Lace editor Gina Abelkop (Darling Beastlettes, 2012) operates as a meditation on what it means to have and inhabit a body, finding herself both human and un-human while navigating the ether between the physical and spiritual. Intertwined throughout are meditations on temporality, home, and ownership, explored through dance music and a visceral, ever-evolving relationship to the land.
In I Eat Cannibals, the spacey-smart, anxious-bold, seriously funny speaker plays every possible role—zoo animal, redhead, pioneer, corset, priest—opposite women who are crushes, heroines and BFFs. The poems channel like mediums at seances, and they time-travel (though admittedly mostly just to shop), drawing Dickinson and Sharon Tate into a contemporary world of "spiritually iridescent horror" where the dominant mode of being is Complicit. "For what I've done / I'm sorry," Abelkop writes, "I do it / every day." Readers of this work are glad she does.
—Arielle Greenberg, author of My Kafka Century and co-editor of Gurlesque
