Consider yourself
at home in this poem, pounding
through the night, in her head
they keep up the construction—
a preemptive network of unmade beds
Part autobiography, part revisionist biography
of Jane Bowles, Unbecoming Behavior is
Kate Colby’s attempt
to “wind [herself] like a stripe to a pole” in
order to catch an honest glimpse of herself "in the corner
of [her own] eye.” The long poem is about personal historicity,
persona, performance, femininity, travel, exile, home, storytelling,
and the act of writing itself.
Kate Colby is the author
of Fruitlands (Litmus
Press, 2006), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award, and
chapbooks from Anadama and Belladonna*.
Recent work has appeared in Aufgabe, New American
Writing and
Vanitas. She grew up in Massachusetts and has recently
moved to Providence after 11 years in San Francisco.
_______
To use her own words, Kate Colby’s poetry “cannibalizes” and
"interbreeds” with itself, with the author’s
life, and with the work
and life of Jane Bowles, the great 20th century fiction writer
and
playwright. This booklength poem creates its own trajectory—a
set of
rapid explosions which transform into caresses. Colby’s
harmonics—graceful, melodic, fluid and dissonant by turn—work
in
counterpoint to the relentless flow of fragments and blurs.
Unbecoming Behavior is hyper-active to the extreme, and a
step onwards.
—Lewis Warsh
Nomadism, childhood, travel, home, and Jane
Bowles’ life and work walk on, around and star in
this gorgeous staging ground of language complete with “fricative
fronds.” Want hot pursuit of meaning? Jane is constant
in flight and anchor through Colby's bold, acrobatic word
play, where one line surprises another. Syntactic gymnastics
name the Jane. Jim Thompson makes a cameo stroke. Thank
the gods! If you have a diamond ring, go pawn it for all
of Ugly Duckling Presse’s editions and especially
Kate Colby's Unbecoming Behavior that dares to say on the
page what no one would speak.
—Gloria Frym
"Kate Colby has a gift for blending observation with
lyric energy and wit."
—Elizabeth Willis (about Colby's Fruitlands)
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