Cunt Norton
Dodie Bellamy
Introduction by Ariana Reines
Cover art by Alice Könitz
Book 3 of 5, TrenchArt: Logistics Series
Prose | $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-934254-49-3
Pages: 75
Binding: Softcover, Perfect
Published: November 19, 2013
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In Cunt Norton, the sequel to her unforgettable Cunt Ups, Dodie Bellamy “cunts” The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1975 edition), setting her text-ravenous cut-ups loose to devour the canonical voices of English literature. The texts that emerge from this sexual-linguistic encounter are monstrous, beautiful, unashamed: 33 erotic love poems (“the greatest fuck poem in the English language,” according to Ariana Reines) that lust after the very aesthetic they resist. “These patriarchal voices that threatened to erase me—of course I love them as well,” Bellamy writes. Even as Cunt Norton dismembers the history of English poetry, “cunting” Chaucer and Shakespeare, Emerson and Lowell, it simultaneously allows new members to arise and fill in the gaps, transforming the secret into the explicit, the classically beautiful into the wonderfully grotesque. Bellamy’s cunted texts breathe life into literary “masters” with joy, honesty, hilarity, and insatiable passion.
Praise for Cunt Norton:
“My poem(s) seem to take to the new medium quite well.”
—John Ashbery
“I think this could be the most joyful book on Earth.”
—Ariana Reines
“Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton…paves the way for poetry’s future while engaging slyly & deeply with its past.”
—Maggie Nelson, PEN America
“What’s so cerebral and canny in Bellamy’s editorial mayhem, eventually, washes away. What’s left is Cunt Norton, a book of poems startlingly original.”
Adam Fitzgerald, The American Reader
“Cunt Norton is a marvel to behold, a ‘savorie Fruit’ to be lusted after, seduced by, and fucked gloriously by.”
David Peak, The Rumpus