Beatty, Jan: Dragstripping

Description

University of Pittsburgh Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 3, 2024

Publisher Marketing: Dragstripping takes us to the literal dragstrip, the strip club, and the dragstrip of the body where the ecstatic is rescripted, where women disappear/reappear in the crosscut of gender. This transgression into and out of form leads to a tighter, more leaping poem that delivers the reader with more punch to experimental moments, pushing against restriction, creating deep, colliding structures between compressed language and an urge to move in terms of content.

On a visceral, foundational level, the culture’s unwillingness to complicate the idea of “woman” and all gender places an untenable burden, casting her into a restricted role that is impossible in its requirements. And unreal. Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, rewriting this crime scene of the body in war – with the missing or murdered as her own investigator. The investigation extends to form that’s linguistically more adventurous, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech. The woman knows in her body that the real/unreal are mixing here, and she finds elation in a strange and shifting land.