Detonated Mirror

by Sara Larsen

Detonated Mirror is a collection of poetry and poetic prose, situated in the otherworldly desert landscape of the Southwest: a place at once feral, magical, elemental and vast, yet at the same time ubiquitously enclosed by brutal barbed wire fence. Larsen's collection is a place of aliens, the atom bomb, scorching sunlight and rough, bony terrain: a place where conspiracies, warfare, and the story of humans, animals and the earth collide in extraordinary ways. The poems explore in a visionary context the explosive and prismatic slippages on the perceived borders of self, lover, land, animal, and consciousness. Sparse, rhythmic pieces share space with prose poems that explore the narrator’s “secret body”. These, in turn, share space with horrific, disorderly, anarchistic poems that buck at the underside of lyricism and playfulness with unhinged rage and obsessions with the grotesque aspects of the body, and of its sex and sexuality. These twisting, roving poems are grounded in paradox and sublimity, and in the often magical, ultra-sensory encounters between bodies, beings, and landscape.

104 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2023

About the author

Sara Larsen is the author of Detonated Mirror (The Elephants), The Riot Grrrl Thing (Roof Books), Merry Hell (Atelos Press), and All Revolutions Will Be Fabulous (Printing Press) as well as several chapbooks. Larsen was a recipient of a 2021 research grant for non-German literature from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe. Readings, performances, and publications can be found at www.saralarsenpoet.com