Overview

What is illusion-a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem-the truth, or ""a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself""? Nicky Beer's latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books-and her personal one, too-in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious. Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini's operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation-but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they're right. ""Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music."" Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one-or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both-together, they might contribute to something like truth.

Full Product Details

Author:   Nicky Beer
Publisher:   Milkweed Editions
Imprint:   Milkweed Editions
ISBN:  

9781571315397

ISBN 10:   157131539
Pages:   88
Publication Date:   21 April 2022
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Temporarily unavailable  
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Table of Contents

Table of Contents Drag Day at Dollywood Self-Portrait as Duckie Dale Cathy Dies Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf Etymology Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs Thorn Ostinato ⇎ Marlene Dietrich Plays Her Musical Saw for the Troops, 1944 Forged Medieval German Church Fresco with Clandestine Marlene Dietrich The Benevolent Sisterhood of Inconspicuous Fabricators The Magicians at Work Sawing a Lady in Half The Great Something The Plagiarist Notes on the Village of Liars Excerpts from The Updated Handbook to Mendacity ⇎ The Stereoscopic Man ⇎ Self-Portrait While Operating Heavy Machinery The Demolitionists Small Claims Courtship Exclusive Interview Marlene Dietrich Meets David Bowie, 1978 Marlene Dietrich Considers Penicillin, 1950 Mating Call of the Re-Creation Panda Scat Heart in Turmeric ⇎ Dear Bruce Wayne, Elegy Kindness/Kindling Juveniles Nessun Dorma The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts Because my grief was a tree Specimen #17 Revision Notes Acknowledgments

Reviews

Nicky Beer's Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a bonafide triumph--beginning with the table of contents. Just a few of her knockout titles: Drag Day at Dollywood, Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs, Dear Bruce Wayne, Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf. Unless you're a pig or a cow, how could you not read on? Beer's intoxication with language combines with drop-dead wackiness and wisdom, and she uses fabrications to get at the truth: how disconnects connect us, how distortions, in concert, undo illusion. Via magicians, impersonators, forgers, plagiarists, liars, screen stars and two-bit actors, Beer delivers dark truths with humor and surprise. The poem Elegy begins: I never liked the dead boy. It's a statement that feels less like confession than blunt instrument. Throughout the collection, the poems do a cannonball through the appropriate or expected into deeper waters. In The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts, Beer writes: she believes death is God's/apology for suffering. And in Drag Day at Dollywood, she gives us a zany fun house of Dollys that morphs into a tender and sad eternity (or illusion thereof) in which: Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses/onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly's breast,/who rests her head on Dolly's breast, who rests/her head on Dolly's breast on Dolly's breast. If that isn't mother's milk, what is? --Andrea Cohen br> 'The sky is one long drink,' Nicky Beer writes in this much-anticipated third collection, serving as a most welcome resource for people who seek imaginative illumination-and who could use a good old-fashioned chuckle. This book shimmers with Beer's trademark wit and wildly inventive takes on pop culture, history, and humankind. Listen for the thump in these pages-this book has a bonafide heartbeat. - Aimee Nezhukumatathil Praise for The Octopus Game I can't help but 'succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw' of these poems. I love their horror and humility, their playfulness. Implicating me in the mysterious beauty of the universe, Beer connects the reader to the octopus, connects the octopus to the reader, and connects us all to her poems' surprising subjects. Drawing insights from least predictable places, these poems are 'a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood.' - Camille Dungy Clever and arresting . . . [Beer's] energy for collecting trivia can equal the verve of her syntax: a group of eight danseurs photographed a century ago are a 'pubescent octet in sepia wash, symmetrically poised / in borrowed frocks'; in the eponymous game, '[t]wo people sit side by side / And become each other's arms.' Beer's insistence on using octopuses (and squid and cuttlefish) as metaphors does not keep her from exploring-and, at times, flaunting-marine zoology, such as when she writes, '[T]he thousands of real / octopus corpses washed / upon' a Portuguese beach years ago. Nor does her attention to the links between human and nonhuman life, to the way that we are all just collections of cells, prevent her from delighting in old forms, especially sonnets and pantoums. - Publishers Weekly Beer takes the octopus as a central conceit in her second collection, which unfolds like a phantasmagoric bestiary. With the eye of a wild documentarian, Beer imagines fantastic names for the strange cephalopods ('viral naiad,' 'charred nebula,' and 'sepia epicene'), and catalogs their otherworldly traits. . . . Beer links humans and invertebrates amid the unfathomable mass of twentieth-century data-the 'maddening swarm of alien ciphers'-and reminds readers of a festering, dark desire: 'We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.' - Booklist Praise for The Diminishing House A wonder of both human understanding and poetic craft. - Pleiades These are more than simply poems of intense intelligence and complexity; every line contains intricate movements, always progressing, redefining, and delighting in language and sound. . . . These are intricate contraptions, delicate and beautiful shapes. - Hollins Critic Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection. - Midwest Book Review

Nicky Beer's Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a bonafide triumph--beginning with the table of contents. Just a few of her knockout titles: Drag Day at Dollywood, Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs, Dear Bruce Wayne, Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf. Unless you're a pig or a cow, how could you not read on? Beer's intoxication with language combines with drop-dead wackiness and wisdom, and she uses fabrications to get at the truth: how disconnects connect us, how distortions, in concert, undo illusion. Via magicians, impersonators, forgers, plagiarists, liars, screen stars and two-bit actors, Beer delivers dark truths with humor and surprise. The poem Elegy begins: I never liked the dead boy. It's a statement that feels less like confession than blunt instrument. Throughout the collection, the poems do a cannonball through the appropriate or expected into deeper waters. In The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts, Beer writes: she believes death is God's/apology for suffering. And in Drag Day at Dollywood, she gives us a zany fun house of Dollys that morphs into a tender and sad eternity (or illusion thereof) in which: Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses/onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly's breast, /who rests her head on Dolly's breast, who rests/her head on Dolly's breast on Dolly's breast. If that isn't mother's milk, what is? --Andrea Cohen br> 'The sky is one long drink, ' Nicky Beer writes in this much-anticipated third collection, serving as a most welcome resource for people who seek imaginative illumination--and who could use a good old-fashioned chuckle. This book shimmers with Beer's trademark wit and wildly inventive takes on pop culture, history, and humankind. Listen for the thump in these pages--this book has a bonafide heartbeat. -- Aimee Nezhukumatathil Praise for The Octopus Game I can't help but 'succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw' of these poems. I love their horror and humility, their playfulness. Implicating me in the mysterious beauty of the universe, Beer connects the reader to the octopus, connects the octopus to the reader, and connects us all to her poems' surprising subjects. Drawing insights from least predictable places, these poems are 'a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood.' -- Camille Dungy Clever and arresting . . . [Beer's] energy for collecting trivia can equal the verve of her syntax: a group of eight danseurs photographed a century ago are a 'pubescent octet in sepia wash, symmetrically poised / in borrowed frocks'; in the eponymous game, '[t]wo people sit side by side / And become each other's arms.' Beer's insistence on using octopuses (and squid and cuttlefish) as metaphors does not keep her from exploring--and, at times, flaunting--marine zoology, such as when she writes, '[T]he thousands of real / octopus corpses washed / upon' a Portuguese beach years ago. Nor does her attention to the links between human and nonhuman life, to the way that we are all just collections of cells, prevent her from delighting in old forms, especially sonnets and pantoums. -- Publishers Weekly Beer takes the octopus as a central conceit in her second collection, which unfolds like a phantasmagoric bestiary. With the eye of a wild documentarian, Beer imagines fantastic names for the strange cephalopods ('viral naiad, ' 'charred nebula, ' and 'sepia epicene'), and catalogs their otherworldly traits. . . . Beer links humans and invertebrates amid the unfathomable mass of twentieth-century data--the 'maddening swarm of alien ciphers'--and reminds readers of a festering, dark desire: 'We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.' -- Booklist Praise for The Diminishing House A wonder of both human understanding and poetic craft. -- Pleiades These are more than simply poems of intense intelligence and complexity; every line contains intricate movements, always progressing, redefining, and delighting in language and sound. . . . These are intricate contraptions, delicate and beautiful shapes. -- Hollins Critic Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection. -- Midwest Book Review

Author Information

Nicky Beer is the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. She is a bi/queer writer, and the author of two other collections of poems, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both winners of the Colorado Book Award. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a MacDowell Fellowship, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Campbell Corner Prize. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, the New Yorker, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado-Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel.

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