Ogress Oblige

By Dorothy Trujillo Lusk

Dorothy Trujillo Lusk is a savagely funny writer whose poetry mangles the clichés of modern life to reach a new kind of negotiated peace. She "lacks breeding and gravitas and degrees," but she's a titanic force in the new Canadian poetry, and Ogress Oblige is a jeremiad of heroic and epic proportions. Lusk writes in a variety of avant-garde forms, then shreds them up into mulch, the better to express the frustrations and rage of the poor single mother--or thinking human being--in a society which cares little for her or us. As one train of invective leaves the station, another pulls in. Wrapped crates pile up on the stationmaster's steps, crates marked "The Monstrous," "The Sacred," "The Female." Words are left gasping all over the page. Her remarkable verbal dexterity is itself a kind of banner of hope, a way out. With grace and mercy, Ogress Oblige surveys a battered landscape in which "art is expensive," for a course in "legendary victim improvement."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1928650112
• ISBN13: 9781928650119
• Release Date: January 2001
• Publisher: Krupskaya
• Length: 64 Pages
• Weight: 0.25 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 5.6" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

more sniping from a hostile city-state

Only a page into the volume, Ogress Oblige quickly 'thought to 'shut me the fawk up' and has kept me in this holding pattern for a couple of months. The numbness is wearing off a little. Yet I still don't have my bearings and hopefully won't, (but a few bearings are nice now and then as they spin in their private caves). It's still so heady, however, and has kept me out of any argumentative state with the book.) What else...

Excerpt from Publishers Weekly Forcasts

"An ahistorical avant-garde verges on apoplexy at the approach of an active mother - RRRRRR -" Juxtaposing high latinate lexemes, frequent internal rhymes and self-consciously stilted neologisms, Lusk evokes the history of England and its poesy as a colonial specter of post-co writhings: "Errant friction fall-out/ to repudiate a lineage/ of hammered patricians."....Subjected to a poltergeist bent on "aural thumpage," rarefied...