LA Liminal

by Becca Klaver

This is Didion's, West's, Chandler's -- but it is also Becca Klaver's now, a beautifully-earned poetic residence -- " ... the new city /fire on the asphalt, antics in the firmament". Who knew there were poems this cock-eyed brilliant and convincing ("skate punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal") to be written about our most spectacularly illusory City? Who knew Klaver was going to burn up Paradise with a full-blown literary style, like a rocket-hot Santa Ana? What a radiant, wickedly-liminal debut, what a star show of sheer hip, lit, hallowed. --Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California
  A skeptical fabulist with a penchant for "monomyths" and "mythovarnishes," it is no surprise that one of Becca Klaver's favorite descriptions of L.A. would be Baudrillard's "a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions." Klaver revels in the interstices between proportion and dimension, jerking the reader while shifting her gaze back and forth from screens of all kinds to the personal space she feistily stakes out. Of course she knows the two are inextricably entwined. As if in cinema's perpetual present, the ghost of L.A. keeps popping up, haunting her debut collection and, fittingly, mesmerizing the reader into a languorous state of mind. --Mónica de la Torre
  LA Liminal gives us bright, lively, playful poems, that know how to cross over and under thresholds, perspectives, and transitions. --Joanne Kyger
 
LA Liminal closely examines what lies beneath the 'glatzy' spectacle of Los Angeles. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver's probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published March 31, 2010

About the author

Becca Klaver is the author of the full-length poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) as well as the chapbooks Inside a Red Corvette: A 90s Mix Tape (greying ghost press, 2009), Nonstop Pop (Bloof, 2013), and Merrily, Merrily (Lame House Press, 2013). She holds degrees from the University of Southern California (BA), Columbia College Chicago (MFA), and Rutgers University (PhD). A founding editor of the feminist poetry press Switchback Books, she is also the co-editor of the digital poetry anthology Electric Gurlesque.

Reviews

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Playful while allowing me to feel sad about all the things liminality always makes me feel sad about while being beautiful and very attuned to the world in a way you would think more poetry would be but isn't. Becca Klaver is a goddamn miracle worker.

[Becca · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What I learned from this book": I learned maybe LA isn't such an awful place after all.

[Brandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whipsmart-clever-innovative yet emotional. My favorite kind of book!

[Christy · Rating 5 out of 5]

YAY, Becca!