Description:
Blood Box, the deliciously haunting debut short collection from poet Zefyr Lisowski, takes us inside the infamous 1892 axe murders of Abby and Andrew Borden through twenty-six wide-ranging, stylistically experimental persona poems. Lisowski re-introduces us to mythologized spinster Lizzie Borden as we've never seen her before: a girl wielding an axe, yes, but also a girl trapped-in the boxes of age, of hunger, of loneliness, of blame. Lizzie, who was acquitted of the double murder of her father and stepmother, yet continues to haunt our cultural psyche over a hundred years later. Even now, " Violence dances with us like ghosts."
In these pages, the notorious crime and its cast of characters serve as a jumping-off point for a textured exploration of inherited violence, queer intimacy, and the way family can be " another geometry, another violence too." Blood Box is Lizzie's story, but it's also the story of grief, of selfhood, of trans and queer becoming. Lisowski's Lizzie Borden is as sweet, sad, spooky, and haunted as a girl with an axe ever can be.
Brief description: Zefyr Lisowski also goes by Zef and is a queer poet, artist, and Southern transplant currently based in New York. She's a poetry co-editor for Apogee Journal, an instructor at Hunter College, and is also author of the microchapbook Wolf Inventory (Ghost City Press, 2018). Zef's received support from the Tin House Summer Workshop, the New York Live Arts Fest, and Sundress Academy for the Arts, among other places; her work has appeared in Muzzle Magazine, DIAGRAM, Entropy, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Pushcart nominee.