Tender Data - Monica McClure (Birds, LLC)

Today's book of poetry:
Tender Data.  Monica McClure.  Birds, LLC.  Austin, Minneapolis, New York, Raleigh.  2015.

Because we haven't had a "list" poem in a while and because you all know how much Today's book of poetry loves a good list poem, we are going to start off today with a hummer.

Monica McClure is a poetry assassin of the highest order.  Her aim is perfect and she is packing some serious heat.  There is very little tender in Tender Data but it is all heart.

Monica McClure

Monica, vain as two crystals in a window

Monica, proportionate face like a student drawing

Monica, passable body like a non-celebrity

Monica, competing affects getting crossed

Monica, languid like a tranquilizer napping in the sun

Monica, sensitive like an artist coming to terms with failure

Monica, signing over her paltry assets

Monica, sleazy like the nouveau riche

Monica, watching herself while watching you

Monica, like a summer in the shade of a factory

Monica, editorial like the ego ideal and like the ideal ego

Monica, effusive like alka seltzer

Monica, blushing like purple areola

Monica, disarming like a borderline

Monica, free as a stolen mink

Monica, steadfast as scotch from an Islay faraway

Monica, lost like a puppy in an undertow

Monica, like lambs in a cavern

Monica, like grey birds aerial diving

Monica, broken like tea leaves in the hand of Jack the Ripper

Monica, in love for the empire and courtly manners

Monica, menstruating with endless iron

Monica, like a truck full of hoop skirts

Monica, sculptural with Debuffet's dirty pick

Monica, saintly fallopian tubes butterflying

Monica, easy like a promise to make

Monica, sluggish as the mind in conversation with itself

Monica, kissing deep a plum cooled on mint

...

Today's book of poetry had to read Tender Data over several sessions simply because the book got too hot to handle.  These pages burn.  McClure absolutely never lets up on the gas.

McClure is fresh, these poems as crisp as new snow, and at the same time these poems know things that only a certain kind of experience reveals.  McClure sounds like she's read everything you've read and then a lot you haven't.  How did she get so wise?

Then we have to deal with the title poem, her opus, "Tender Data",  Oh my, oh my.  What wondrous thing is this?  Monica McClure's long poem "Tender Data" is surgery with an emotional laser and she lays it all open.

     "You don't have the guts for me

       Why people do evil is

       the only question worth asking"

Think Hunter S. Thompson and Erica Jong having a love child devoted to poetry and writing a new feminist manifesto for a new order.  No prisoners taken here.  McClure isn't afraid of anyone or anything.

Today's book of poetry would absolutely love to show you the entire poem but the length of the poem precludes inclusion.  But take our word for it - McClure is staking out territory with fierce intent.

Mammary

The Chateau Marmont in winter

is like a beautiful woman in the morning

on the second day of her period

It's a body rejecting its implants

Lindsay Lohan is walking around

like she owes the place

sliding into the darkest seat

with two lesbian truckers

I'm sipping an Italian aperitif

and feeling exuberant

like it's the 20th century

and a love sick Breton is whispering

messages on my answering machine

in an empty antechamber

while I check my powder on my iPhone

When I lost my academic job

I became an unskilled sex worker

and got pregnant out of professional frustration

My mother drove me to a midwife

in the first light of morning

Lazy Susans on the table spin me

another cold highball

...

Today's book of poetry regular morning read was a fiasco.  The women in our office insisted they do all the reading this morning.  Kathryn, our new intern, must have used the word "empowering" at least seven times.  She gave all us men the stink-eye more than once.

Tender Data is powerful stuff and it is gloriously relentless.  McClure struts with her time on stage because she can and we all reap the rewards.

White Girl Wasted

There's nothing inherently noble about work

At New York Dolls I could choose to sit

and let men buy my drinks

instead of hauling ice buckets

of champagne across the mainstage floor

I didn't make money when I got drunk

instead of getting men drunk

but I was not cold or sober either

My heels dangled from the bar stool

as I watched the engorged breasts of girls

tremble in the arcade-like wavelengths

weightless and bovine

A happy couple stumbled in and soon

the wife was throwing up

in our dressing room

We held her hair back

careful not to drop ashes

in her shiny blowout

I was Kathy Acker in the 80s

doing nothing exceptional yet everything

in a corset without muscles

Her husband had paid for two hours upstairs

and was up to his watches in flesh

You girls are mistaken I said

to seduce this stupid city

Then I went home no richer or poorer

than when I showed up

I wish I could get shit-faced wasted

on my own dime

and have someone I trust carry

me screaming and drooling into a taxi

I think of the words of Anastasia

the fat ballerina of the Bolshoi

"I'm going to fuck the shit out of this world."

Goodnight swans on your lakes of vodka

...

Today's book of poetry puts Monica McClure at the top of whatever list I'm making today, she should be on the top of whatever list you are making.  Tender Data will make you love poetry in whole new way.

Monica McClure

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Monica McClure is a write and performer living in New York City.  Previously, her poetry has been published in the chapbooks, Mood Swing (Snacks Press, 2013) and Mala (Poor Claudia, 2014).

BLURB

McClure may be the poster-girl for a new generation of poets: irreverent, well-read, sexy, even dirty, snarky, but ultimately fighting an earnest battle against reductiveness and easy answers to the complex problems of the Internet age: "Every citizen of this world is on trial/ I'm learning to speak legalese/ as I stroll through civil law like/ a gamine through a sample sale."

     - Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

Word Warriors:  Monica McClure

Video: The Huffington Post

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