Cover art: Lucio Fontana,
Concetto spaziale, 1958.
Oil and pastel on canvas.
Private collection.
Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York,
with the permission of
Fondazione Lucio
Fontana, Milan.
In her third collection, Beatty travels inside the body to the blood that codes us, moving beyond the language of post-confessionialism and into fourth-wave feminism, challenging notions of the “romantic” and the “brutal” and how they exist within us and between us. Red Sugar asks: how do we talk about the humanity that surfaces in the midst of transformation?
We see woman as recorder of dreams and deeds of culture: one of “Blake’s Angels” as a stripper heroin addict who is desired by the woman speaker; Beatty looks at transgression from the inside out in the title poem: “When I was young I was a comet/with an unending shimmering tail,/and I flew over the brokenness below/ that was my life.” Blood as code, blood as ultimate storyteller, vault, and carrier of dreams.
Yet there is luminosity in these waves of experience, as Beatty brings us a new way of looking at the ecstatic by standing outside of joy and rendering it alive. There is frenzy and there is a canopy of danger to this American version of the romantic, but it is this mosaic of immediacy that says all authentic experience has power