About the Poems - JC
About the Poems
by Jamison Crabtree Monster movies are such strange little things. In them, we willingly give our fears a body, a face; we make them something we can deal with on a physical level. And we do this with the expectation that the movie will end once that body has been destroyed. But the monsters we create in film aren’t pure archetypes; they’re characters who (more often than not) were once the victims of some sort of extreme physical trauma (like the detonation of a nuclear weapon) or emotional trauma (grief and abuse are common ones). It seemed like a great frame for the exploration of the issues I’d already been writing about— namely, intimacy and violence. So I started working on these laments. Sometimes cruel, sometimes funny; these poems are meant to be read as desperate. These poems are about monsters, but not really. In their own way, I think of these as love poems.