Throne of Blood

by Cassandra Troyan

Available at Solar▲Luxuriance
http://solarluxuriance.com/throne/

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR THRONE OF BLOOD
“Cassandra Troyan goes for the throat, and once she's in the throat she goes for the gonads, then the brain. No sex is safe, as is no being. Let her re-teach you how to cower.”--Blake Butler

“Troyan's is a voracious language that gurgles itself, spits back up and swallows again only to become a new hungry hole, always phoenixing, always being born, never finished filling. In her 10000 rebirths we can finally see our own wants clearly: stained, wetdreamt, slit and sticky, but innocent in never having been informed why we are alive. This book is very dirty and very, very pure.”--Melissa Broder

“This book will disturb you to the same degree that you should have been disturbed before you read it. Cassandra Troyan's aphoristic poems reminded me that things are grimmer and life is sadder and filthier than I have will to believe, no matter how often I hear about Jersey Shore. Troyan fills her cup with blood and mucous and says "take, drink." She says, "The body is meat. The meat has feels." Her narratives form a feedback loop with the sound a human brain makes as she squishes it under her boot. She can be as abject as Bataille or as sick as Cèline, but through it all, maybe best of all, she is also funny.”--Adam Robinson

Genres: Poetry

94 pages, ebook

First published February 25, 2013

About the author

Cassandra Troyan is a writer, scholar, and ex-artist whose work uses a materialist feminist lens to demarcate space for interventions in the spheres of theory, politics, and culture. They are the author of several books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently A Theory in Tears (ANNOTATIONS & CASES FOR FREEDOM & PROSTITUTION) (Kenning Editions 2016), and have presented, performed, or screened their work at venues such as the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASSMoCA); New York Art Book Fair at MoMA/PS1; the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (MCA); The University of Toronto’s “Sex Salon” at the Mark Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies; Poetics: (The Next) 25 Years at SUNY-University at Buffalo; Capitalism, Crisis and Ideology lecture series at Cardiff University; Casco: Office for Art, Design & Theory in Utrecht, NL; Stanford Humanities Center at Stanford University; Perdu in Amsterdam, NL with retrospectives at Spectacle Theater in Brooklyn, NY and at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco, CA. They live in Kalmar, Sweden and teach as a Senior Lecturer at Linnaeus University in the Department of Design.

Troyan’s work explores the terror of becoming female amidst the accelerated haze of contemporary culture, deriving pleasure and power from interrogations of submission, violence, queer desire, sex work, horror, and capital. By engaging a practice of radical alterity, Christopher Higgs writes in a review at The Collagist, “The question Throne of Blood seems interested in provoking is not the basic ontological question, "what does it mean to be," but rather a more rabidly black and potently nihilistic question: who gives a fuck about being? Or, put in the form of a statement rather than a question: to be is not to be, forget the question.” At Vice, Blake Butler evinces another notion of being in Kill Manual, as “Troyan infects the struggle of the self into a living, breathing language-system, spitting and shrieking and cackling rather than just whining and worshipping, using reality's death threat against itself.”

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fuck poems with birds, I'm the one who gets to fly"

Troyan has got a sledge hammer and just keeps swinging. Not for the faint of heart.

"Go home after school and eat your cat / .... / I am post food."

This somehow alchemizes buckets of blood, the visqueux/slimy, social media age throw away bon-motism, and all other kinds of stuff.

"When plasma scabs against brackish skin and skull / the sodium channel will only allow up to 3 minutes of paralysis."

It also wraps up desire, violation, vulnerability, and aggression and how these things all whip each other around.

"If you could see your mass ballooning. / If you could imagine terror / .... / There is always urgency since life / has no exteriority"

& hooray for the maximalist book design. Glad CT and I got to trade stuff. This is the first AWP book I've actually read. Hope this is a sign of what's to come over the course of the summer.

[Brooks Sterritt · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When you laugh you knock the cum plug out of life."

[Xian Xian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now, that I’m finally loving poetry, I decided to pick this chapbook up. When I downloaded it months ago, Solar Luxuriance provides free downloads of their out-of-print chapbooks, I kept giving it up and picking up something else. The first “chapter” is actually a short story written in poetry. Is there a name for ‘Short story poetry’? I guess it would be narrative poetry. Anyway, that was one of the best parts of the chapbook, not only because I rarely find that style of poetry, but it is my favorite kind of poetry because it’s short stories, but not actually a short story. It tells the story of these two male necrophiliacs that murder women and girls and bury them in the basement. A lot of her poetry kind of has this feminist undertone to it, where she mourns the death and mistreatment of women and girls by the hands of men. It’s feminist because most people don’t take the mistreatment of women seriously. If you don’t believe me, well listen to how many people make jokes about rape and blaming rape on rape victims. But yeah.

Then after that, there’s some more poetry similar to do that, except girls don’t die physically, they die on the inside. I think these might’ve been slightly autobiographical. Where father’s disappoint and men kill women mentally repeatably for feeling too much.

This chapbook was actually fairly popular in the small press world so I feel like my review is basically going to repeat the same thing. Of course most of this chapbook isn’t too dark, some of it is light hearted somewhat. A care free feminist chapbook about being a woman who owns her sexuality, disappointment in relationships, self-hatred and inability to cope with it, and existential angst. Topic wise, it’s not much different than your usual poetry book in the Alt. Lit world. But Troyan’s biting and vivid poetry stands out from the Tao Lin esque poetry writing I usually see to the point where it’s unavoidable. (Not knocking him, just saying that there’s way too many people writing like him now, with slight differences, but not very much the same.)

Rating: 4.5/5

Originally posted on Notes on the Shore

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was effective and unique. Dark, certainly. I can't say I enjoyed it per se. It does take the reader to the dregs of one's thoughts. At this point in my life I didn't enjoy that but I'm sure at another point I will.

[Brooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

If poetry uses grotesque imagery and challenging language, I wish that the theme it tries to convey was a little less self-centered. "Preamble" approached that, it was my favorite thing in the book and kept this from being 1 star.

[Ana Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came upon this by accident, or it came to me.