Excessive Love Prostheses

The heart, writes Margaret Christakos, is ‘a public organ of private damage.’ The poems in Excessive Love Prostheses confess, rather than deride, the complexities of contemporary desire, describing a subject that is both public and private, physical and virtual.

Excessive Love Prostheses takes the confessional lyric poem and runs it through Kathy Acker’s Cuisinart. Christakos shapes a sensory surfeitry of pornography, cautionary nursery rhymes, mothering, bisexuality and the paradoxes of feminism into poignant analogies for contemporary obsessions and ailments; here are the voices of construction workers, staple sorters, obstetricians, video technicians and others, shattered and sorted by a practiced writerly hand. The result is a near-ecstatic tribute to the hyper-embodied intelligence of a new millennial subject.