Vulgar Mechanics

by K.B. Thors

In Vulgar Mechanics, K. B. Thors seeks to invent new strategies for survival through the two most basic tools available to the speaker: language and the body. The work begins in collapse, the poems acting as witness to the death of a mother. The speaker documents how, as her mother's physical body disintegrates, hidden knowledge rises to the surface in the form of "seismic legacy data." As dark secrets are released, the desire for justice demands improvisation. Moving from the fracked landscapes of the prairies to the steep verticality of New York, this is a collection concerned with hunger, anger, and the shifting fault-lines between play and pain. The poems celebrate the body as a vehicle of excavation and self-determination in a world in which there may be no such a thing as a safe word. Thors pushes against the boundaries of language - the material of sense, meaning - in order to claim a quantum vision of the self, one who transforms trauma into energy through its own multiplicity. The body becomes both ghost and machine, burning the past in its engine to make something beautiful and new, "a thunder egg / bucking the fire pit."

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 2019

Reviews

[Katharine Coldiron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phenomenally compressed, beautifully feminist poetry with a density of language that forces you to slow down. Such textured and rhythmic language! Thors is a fierce, bold, remarkable voice.

[Crystal Odelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

K. B. Thors is a vulgar mechanic, a contemporary feminist voice that explores survival among the death obsessed. Brilliantly complicated by gender identity, language and the body become her tools of excavating spaces urban and rural, modern and mythic, public and deeply private. Above all, Thors's voice is smart and alive.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Kick a rock from the edge
and an echo will say
it takes just as many legs

to unhinge yourself
as there are constellations
in our blind spots.”

[K · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gorgeous book is full of intensity and style and will need to be read and reread. Grief, bodies, gender, reckoning with the past and the future. Read it!