Fort Gorgeous
Winner of The National Poetry Review Press Book Prize
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If the Surrealists decided to market a line of practical jokes, Fort Gorgeous would be their catalog. Each poem is a squirt flower that sprays you with puns, yet Vogel goes way beyond word play: her cultural playing field includes everything from pig Latin to Dante, manga to Wuthering Heights. What a delight this book is!
- David Kirby, author of Talking About Movies With Jesus
In her debut collection, Fort Gorgeous, poet Angela Vogel uses vivid phrasing and imaginative wit to construct a realm both sublime and satirical. Here, the newly wakened Rip Van Winkle is warned to check on his garden gnomes ("the paprika of / landscape"), while the Crooked Man admits that his house is "an abomination / in an otherwise orthogonal world." Here, a contrarian venus flytrap brags "I was the freak Darwin / shook from the trees. When the world pimped, / I primped. When the world pinched, I nipped." What is not inspired by myth and nature is shaped by pop-culture pathos, as when we meet the "Fat Chick" who knows "When my body dies, my soul will rise / like the steam from a jelly roll." These poems will be relished by any mind that appreciates clever, reflexive wordplay - and embraced by any heart that's ever wondered if it, too, will survive journeying through the "carpel / tunnel of love."
- Sandra Beasley, author of I Was the Jukebox
