Fall Garment

by Paul Cunningham

Stitched together from a kaleidoscope of references/strands that are effervescent, baroque, Jurassic, bedazzled, and harrowing, Paul Cunningham's Fall Garment is like the avant-garde runway fashions from Thom Browne (one of the book's many inspirations), or like the beguiling pieces by the late great Alexander McQueen. It shows you something you never dreamed of before. And you don't understand why you're crying, but you are.
—Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

Fall Garment has a factory appetite, hungry for what lies beneath the fabric of language. Cunningham-as-tailor drapes the whole enterprise of American commerce over a shoulder, trims our losses tight across a chest. A longing parody of trappings, an ode to all that we’ve labored out of violence, an elegy of place as industry. The fashioning of fashion. Take a break on the boss’s time, turn around, check in on your friends. Together we can ask: if at the centre lies Nature, how did it all get so rotten, can we laugh while we are manufactured as ghosts?
—Noah Ross, author of Active Reception

Fall Garment's linguistic decadence is undercut by grit, pollution, a leaning toward “the number of times you / desired pitch-black” when beauty’s resources are used up. In reading Cunningham’s singular voice, I’m seduced by a vatic tailor who cuts bolts from the cloth of queer experience, bedazzles them with glass to make them one-of-a-kind (i.e., not susceptible to capitalist greed), and gifts them to those he sees himself in. “A queer tucked in by flowers,” he sings to us about why the earth is sore. His luxuriation in language is a palliative to existential devastation.
—Justin Wymer, author of Deed

Lyrical faggotry of the highest order! Paul Cunningham's Fall Garment is hot, wounded, and reptilian.
—Magdalena Zurawski, author of Companion Animal

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 2010

About the author

Paul Cunningham co-manages Action Books. He is the author of two poetry collections from Schism Press: Fall Garment (2022) and The House of the Tree of Sores (2020). His next chapbook Sociocide at the 24/7 is forthcoming from New Michigan Press in 2025. His translation of Sara Tuss Efrik's play Danse Macabre Piggies was anthologized in Experimental Writing: A Guidebook and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Cunningham currently manages the MFA in Creative Writing Program at the University of Notre Dame where he also teaches. He holds a PhD from the University of Georgia, where he was the recipient of the 2021 Diann Blakely Poetry Prize.

Reviews

[final muzak · Rating 4 out of 5]

i don’t know how many years a man-
made structure can manufacture the same disaster

or how long it takes a disaster’s ashes
to sky a town with new birds

These poems make my heart yearn for Western Pennsylvania.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

I still struggle to describe the poetry I like in precise terms, but I can say this is exactly the kind of transgressive poetry I always seek and rarely find. To me it reads like a post-modern, lightly dystopic, slightly cracked meditation on fashion, factories in decline, garbage religion (the middle section of the book, "SIC ARK", riffs on Jurassic Park and the creationist hellspace Ark Encounter), the AIDS crisis, and maybe a dash of biblical urolagnia, with scattered bits of a gay coming of age tale woven throughout.

I was drawn to Cunningham's poetry through his work with Action Books, one of my favorite modern poetry publishers (for which Cunningham is the Managing Editor), and a quote I came across somewhere talking about his love of Aase Berg's intensely weird / perfect poetry collection With Deer. Fall Garment is very much its own thing, but it rides the same jagged edge as the stuff that led me here. Highly recommended.

[Jace Brittain · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning trilogy anchored by the brilliant erasure that bridges its ecstatic, other-worldly parts.

That middle part, SIC ARK, does something I love for erasures to do: scathes and scythes its source, complicates its source, mutates its dinosaur DNA, poisons its wells and bathes luxuriously in those festering waters.