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The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

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The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

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Overview

"Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation's emerging pathology and sensibility." —John Ashbery

A Paris Review Staff Pick and Most Anticipated Book of 2018 at NYLON, Bustle, Autostraddle, and more.

The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is a collection of poems that take place in a burlesque purgatory where the living pay—dearly, with both money and conscience—to watch the dead perform scandalous acts otherwise unseen: “$20 for five minutes. I’ll hold your hand in my own,” one ghost says. “I’ll tell you you were good to me.” Like Dante before her, Stone positions herself as the living poet passing through and observing the land of the dead. She imagines a feminist Limbo where women run the show and create a space to navigate the difficulties endured in life. With a nod to her grandmother Ruth Stone’s poem “The Mobius Strip of Grief,” Stone creates a labyrinthine underworld as a way to confront and investigate complicated family relationships in the hopes of breaking the never-ending cycle of grief.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781941040850
Publisher:	Tin House Books
Publication date:	02/27/2018
Pages:	90
Sales rank:	1,031,402
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Bianca Stone is the author of The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014), and Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours (Pleiades Press, 2016). She lives with her husband, the poet Ben Pease, and their daughter, Odette, in Goshen, Vermont.

[Odin plucked out his eye in exchange for a drink] 1

Introduction 5

Medieval 6

Last Words 7

Lap Dance 9

A Brief Topography of the MSCOG 10

The Murder 14

Client 16

Mama-san 17

Hunter 18

All the Single Mothers 20

Honeybee 21

Emily Dickinson 23

Math 24

I Am Unfaithful to You with My Genius 26

Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother 35

How Not 36

Interior Design 37

Flight 40

The Reading 42

Self-Destruction Sequence 43

Stenographer 45

Elegy with a Swear Word 46

Cliff Elegy 47

The Fates 48

Dear Sister 50

The Gang Elegy 53

Blue Jays 54

Ones Who Got Away with It 73

Letter to a Letter to the Editors 75

The Green Word 80

Migration 83

Retreating Knights and Riderless Horses, or Poem with Another Poem Halfway Through It 85

The Fall 87

The Woman Downstairs 88

The Walking Dead 89

The Lit Club Slaughter 90

In the Champagne Room with Grandma 92

Elegy with Clothes 94

I'll Be Happy 95

Historic Flaws 96

The Dark Ages, Revisited 97

Bibliography 103

From the B&N Reads Blog

Page 1 of

Editorial Reviews

Family cycles of grief and trauma are this book's dominant theme; Stone's exploration is Hieronymus Bosch-like: blithely cluttered, compellingly repellent.

The New York Times Book Review - Daisy Fried

★ 11/20/2017
Balancing a confessional voice with humor and portentous imagery, Stone (Poetry Comics from the Book of Hours) explores grief, familial connection, and the small things that sustain life in her startling third collection. Readers encounter feuds with Anne Sexton’s nieces and a hereafter where the dead perform for the living. But Stone’s great achievements are two sequences that share an awed admiration for the female mind. The first, “I am Unfaithful to You with My Genius,” is an ode to women writers and their “demon of genius—mad genius,” inspiring the poet to devotion: “like Antigone I would ruin myself for you.” The second, “Blue Jays,” pays homage to the poet’s mother, and by extension all women (“Mothers are all I have ever known”). Stone captures her mother’s eccentricities and burdens with heartbreaking clarity: “your genius trapped like a moth on the screened-in porch of your pain.” The book ends in a somber elegy for America—“I feel the phantom limbs of my predecessors/ waving in the air,” Stone writes—putting an exclamation point on a collection that features a bravely vulnerable beating heart hidden beneath layers of irony and clever misdirection. Stone is the child of her muses, Sexton and Emily Dickinson, and it is an odd but delightful union. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Stone follows grief—and its many manifestations—through a salacious, serpentine strip-club underworld . . . sharply observed, wryly playful, and fiercely defiant."

Booklist

"[A] brilliant, wildly imaginative mediation on grief and loss and coping with being human and then not being at all."

NYLON

"Bianca Stone’s lyricism outright rejects the Wordsworthian definition, 'emotion recollected in tranquility'; there is nothing tranquil about these poems or the state in which they were written. Grief, loss, and disappointment are transferred to a landscape of wild objects and associations. We are propelled along by abrupt changes in perspective and dimension. Bianca Stone is a brilliant transcriber of her generation’s emerging pathology and sensibility."

John Ashbery

"The Möbius Strip Club of Grief showcases a talent who is bold, original and highly attuned to human suffering, though the collection is not without moments of humor. Stone's wild and ingenious exhibitionism exposes the psyche's innermost sensitivities—a literary strip club for the soul."

Shelf Awareness

"Perhaps the most intriguing of the upcoming releases . . . The Möbius strip is easy to construct but for those who enter such a space, escape is impossible—a situation readers may find themselves in when they start reading these stellar poems."

Signature Reads

"Meditative and darkly entertaining, vivid and visceral, a little bit out-of-control, The Möbius Strip Club of Grief is filled with tired bodies, bodies with scars, other women poets, and members of Stone’s own family — including a grandmother who herself is being grieved. This is a poetry collection like few you’ll come across."

Bustle

"A little bit Inferno, but maybe even more so the deliciously devilish No Exit, Stone’s book is a strange, entertaining journey into an underground world where poor souls are 'clinging to our tragedies, finding our favorite face.' . . . You’ve never quite seen a poetic party like this."

The Millions

"Fantastically unsettling and sparks a serious meditation on grief and family, from a distinctly feminine perspective. . . . [Stone] populates her poems with characters that range from Emily Dickinson to her grandmother, and the result is the feeling that we are witnessing a soul’s intimate reckoning with life. Many poets have attempted to imagine the afterlife, and Stone’s addition to the tradition disrupts it in the best way."

The Paris Review

"A feminist counterpart to Lincoln in the Bardo. Poet Bianca Stone’s new collection submerges the reader in burlesque purgatory. Depicting a contemporary Hades, Stone revivifies ghosts of women poets long past and eulogizes their fierce genius."

New York Magazine

The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

The Mobius Strip Club of Grief

Paperback

Paperback

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Customer Reviews

Related collections and offers

Overview

Product Details

About the Author

Table of Contents

Related Subjects

Customer Reviews