lelex's review against another edition
5.0
I loved this. My favorites were “Making Applesauce with My Dead Grandmother,” “Blue Jays,” and “Ones Who Got Away with It.”
“You have to show a scar to the bouncer to get in - any scar will do. And you have to tell a story about your mother. Something she suffered through. But once you’re in, you’re in forever.”
“I hold court all day on my own intellectual shortcomings. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The known universe is saying Fuck, softly into the unknown universe. It’s a very long winter. I can’t remember anyone’s name or whether I finished my beer.”
“Your brother got too serious,” Mom said, smoking in the car in her wool jacket with the elastic loops for shotgun shells and the flannel insert and loose M&M’s in the pockets (I loved her in that coat). “He said I was sinning for drinking coffee.’”
“I had no taste for wine then, no feel for maps. I was always stopping and staring for too long at sculptures, which were everywhere - I didn’t even have to know where I was going, they came to me, those statues - men with their swords up in the air and severed heads in their hands, women with small perfect gray breasts - and my brother would disappear into the crowded streets as if he’d lived there for decades and was late to work.”
“(the greatest trick of humans, making the sky into matter -)
“What to do with this mind? Throw everything into the fire and scream into the internet that there’s nothing to do but stand in the dark recesses throwing a bright red doge ball against the bone facade and fall in and out of love with suffering?”
“You have to show a scar to the bouncer to get in - any scar will do. And you have to tell a story about your mother. Something she suffered through. But once you’re in, you’re in forever.”
“I hold court all day on my own intellectual shortcomings. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The known universe is saying Fuck, softly into the unknown universe. It’s a very long winter. I can’t remember anyone’s name or whether I finished my beer.”
“Your brother got too serious,” Mom said, smoking in the car in her wool jacket with the elastic loops for shotgun shells and the flannel insert and loose M&M’s in the pockets (I loved her in that coat). “He said I was sinning for drinking coffee.’”
“I had no taste for wine then, no feel for maps. I was always stopping and staring for too long at sculptures, which were everywhere - I didn’t even have to know where I was going, they came to me, those statues - men with their swords up in the air and severed heads in their hands, women with small perfect gray breasts - and my brother would disappear into the crowded streets as if he’d lived there for decades and was late to work.”
“(the greatest trick of humans, making the sky into matter -)
“What to do with this mind? Throw everything into the fire and scream into the internet that there’s nothing to do but stand in the dark recesses throwing a bright red doge ball against the bone facade and fall in and out of love with suffering?”
marginaliant's review against another edition
1.0
You can’t just write a poem about having a spiritual awakening while watching an episode of Supernatural and think I won’t call you out on it!
In all seriousness, there’s nothing poetic in here. It’s just ugly.
In all seriousness, there’s nothing poetic in here. It’s just ugly.
cstefko's review against another edition
2.0
2.5 stars
Yeah, this was just a bit too weird and macabre for me. There were definitely some individual poems that I liked, but they were the less conceptual ones. I particularly loved "Self-Destruction Sequence" and its ending: "It's a kind of holy moment that unfills anger." There were aspects of Stone's style that I really enjoyed, but most of this was just too abstract for me.
Yeah, this was just a bit too weird and macabre for me. There were definitely some individual poems that I liked, but they were the less conceptual ones. I particularly loved "Self-Destruction Sequence" and its ending: "It's a kind of holy moment that unfills anger." There were aspects of Stone's style that I really enjoyed, but most of this was just too abstract for me.
margaret_adams's review against another edition
As Gabe said, “I’d recommend these poems to anyone who feels the urge to headbutt books out of empathetic anger.”
(Thanks for the rec, Gabe.)
-from Interior Designs
-from Blue Jays
(Thanks for the rec, Gabe.)
I feel like your rejection slips, collated in a folder. Outdated
science magazine
of inaccurate information—
I would love to “move on.” But I carry you around like a scar,
forgetting sometimes that it is even there
until I follow a stranger’s eye to it during a handshake.
-from Interior Designs
Watch me loving you forever, Mom, on this strip of land
we call grief—but it is only life!
Do you know the game?
The game is called Being Unhappy, Just in Case.
or Gratitude as a Weakness.
And we play sometimes when there is nothing else to do.
-from Blue Jays
mjaimezuckerman's review against another edition
5.0
Although Bianca Stone wrote The Möbius Strip Club of Grief before fourth-wave feminism picked up the “Me Too” tagline, the book’s publication and my reading of it landed smack in the middle of all the news stories in which empowered and angry women demanded (once again) an end to rape culture. Right when I struggled to place myself in the discourse—I had worried the language was more symbolic than paradigm-shifting—Bianca Stone’s newest collection of poetry entered my life. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief builds on the intellectual work of its feminist forebears and offers a vision of womanhood that is raw, raging, sad, and beautiful. The women in Stone’s poems don’t fit any of the definitions of woman that society has neatly provided; her poems blur, challenge, and outright erase those definitions completely. In their place, Stone offers a womanhood in which we can find some sort of personal freedom from all the grief of simply living. A womanhood that will last long after the current trends have lost their shine and we still need to be heard.
Stone’s first collection of poems, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows—as well as her collection of poetry, comics, and several chapbooks—are full of falling in love, being lost and found, sometimes desperate, sometimes joyful abandon. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief maintains Stone’s sassy humor and startling imagery, but this collection is thematically linked by the world-building of a purgatorial strip club (the MSCOG). This collection feels more mature than the earlier work, if only in the tasks it takes on: growth, defying the world, and mourning. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief begins as an elegy for Bianca Stone’s grandmother, the poet Ruth Stone, and becomes an elegy for America.
The opening poem introduces the MSCOG as where Odin goes when he sees “everything blown to shit. The gods with it.” It’s a purgatorial afterlife and underworld where Bianca Stone’s grandma and all the other grandmas are strippers; we can visit, have a cocktail or a joint, read a few poems, and find a little comfort. Much of Part I takes place in the aftermath of a funeral, inside the MSCOG, exploring personal loss and grief. “Introduction” beckons readers into the strip club with a grotesquely gleeful circus-caller style. Inside, “there’s Grandma, with / her breasts hanging at her stomach—gorgeous with a shook / manhattan, and murderous with a maxi pad.” There is a real tenderness for grandma’s body, and these poems are a bluntly sketched celebration of women’s bodies in all their forms. One dead stripper admonishes us for not visiting much when she was alive, then offers “$20 for five minutes; / I’ll hold your hand in my own. I’ll tell you / you were good to me.” The comfort and reassurance found here is exactly what we didn’t realize we needed. In “Last Words,” a grief-maddened mother asks, “Who will pay? Who will pay? Who will pay,” with each iteration blossoming larger, from personal grief to the responsibility of our country’s broader paradigm for inflicting its tragedies on us.
The elegy progresses from an intimate and personal grief to a broader, psychological grief. In “Hunter,” Stone explains, “I can’t tell anymore whether I am grieving you particularly / or simply find life and death erroneous.” In “Cliff Elegy,” she imagines the grief particular to falling in love like an extended falling scene akin to that of Wile E. Coyote or Alice in Wonderland. There is an elegy for male honeybees dying from orgasm, and one for Emily Dickinson, whose poems are “like grenades that fit in the hand.” Stone also explores the grief in families. The stunning eighteen-page, twelve-part poem “Blue Jays” makes associative leaps, linking her mother to a blue jay, portraying her as both a source of grief and “so much joy.”
I love my mother, the way I love birds.
The blue jay always
is the biggest bird around the bird feeder—makes
strange loud songs,
a little aggressive, but gorgeous, known
for its intelligence and complex social systems
with tight family bonds, a biblical fondness for acorns,
spreading oak trees into existence
after the last glacial period.
What a celebration of motherhood: those flawed and forceful women who made you who you are and who are sometimes the source of sadness. The mother is Stone’s mother, and mine, and all of our ungentle and irreplaceable mothers.
Stone’s book has still more enlarging to do as her grief comes to include the American patriarchy that causes pain for all of us. In an early poem, Stone proudly accepts the tacit belief that a woman being loyal to her own creative genius entails “unfaithfulness” to her husband. Stone commands, “Ladies, enjoy the pleasures of your own mind! The creative woman in this living patriarchy wants to be both object and subject of creation. Blow up your television, love me instead, my genius says to me.” In the later half of the collection, Stone gets more pointed about this toxic American culture, comparing the world to “a wolf tied to a flower [. . .] Something too violent / is attached to something / so living.” In “Ones Who Got Away with It,” she recalls a bulimic thirteen-year-old girl who was “shared” by a frat boy and his friends, and who decided to be proud of what happened to her. Stone envisions those men now, “important men, I imagine. Men who now run conglomerates / and have well-to-do families. Or maybe men I see / every day at work. Or whose books I read.” She’s shining a light on the reality and daring us to acknowledge our own complicity. When I read this poem, I felt pissed off and heartbroken and alive, which is the point; Stone says “do something drastic / like live and live and live.”
Stone’s poems ultimately draw a connection between a toxic, patriarchal paradigm and today’s American system. “Nothing burns quite like the System. It comes at you / when you ask for help, displaying its super-talons / around a clutch of arrows, saying No.” The image of the patriotic, arrow-clutching eagle refusing our needs seems insurmountable. The final long poem responds directly to our current era, where “Trump . . . oils his way across the tangible world.” In this final elegy, Stone balances hopelessness with fierce determination. She asks herself about the collection, “Why am I writing this psychosexual opus to the mind of my women?” Because, Bianca, we need to hear it. We need all the inspiration we can get right now. In this poem, Stone gets as close as she can to an “answer” to the particular grief of women which is: “we must invent, while living a life: / nothing irrelevant here, nothing stopping you—invent! / invent! / invent! / stretch out / a social destiny!” It is through the “genius” or the creativity of women—grandmas, mothers, daughters—that we can find some salvation or solace. It’s poetry itself that gives us our agency and helps us overcome our multitude of grief.
Review originally published in Kenyon Review: https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-mobius-strip-club-of-grief-by-bianca-stone-738439/
Stone’s first collection of poems, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows—as well as her collection of poetry, comics, and several chapbooks—are full of falling in love, being lost and found, sometimes desperate, sometimes joyful abandon. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief maintains Stone’s sassy humor and startling imagery, but this collection is thematically linked by the world-building of a purgatorial strip club (the MSCOG). This collection feels more mature than the earlier work, if only in the tasks it takes on: growth, defying the world, and mourning. The Möbius Strip Club of Grief begins as an elegy for Bianca Stone’s grandmother, the poet Ruth Stone, and becomes an elegy for America.
The opening poem introduces the MSCOG as where Odin goes when he sees “everything blown to shit. The gods with it.” It’s a purgatorial afterlife and underworld where Bianca Stone’s grandma and all the other grandmas are strippers; we can visit, have a cocktail or a joint, read a few poems, and find a little comfort. Much of Part I takes place in the aftermath of a funeral, inside the MSCOG, exploring personal loss and grief. “Introduction” beckons readers into the strip club with a grotesquely gleeful circus-caller style. Inside, “there’s Grandma, with / her breasts hanging at her stomach—gorgeous with a shook / manhattan, and murderous with a maxi pad.” There is a real tenderness for grandma’s body, and these poems are a bluntly sketched celebration of women’s bodies in all their forms. One dead stripper admonishes us for not visiting much when she was alive, then offers “$20 for five minutes; / I’ll hold your hand in my own. I’ll tell you / you were good to me.” The comfort and reassurance found here is exactly what we didn’t realize we needed. In “Last Words,” a grief-maddened mother asks, “Who will pay? Who will pay? Who will pay,” with each iteration blossoming larger, from personal grief to the responsibility of our country’s broader paradigm for inflicting its tragedies on us.
The elegy progresses from an intimate and personal grief to a broader, psychological grief. In “Hunter,” Stone explains, “I can’t tell anymore whether I am grieving you particularly / or simply find life and death erroneous.” In “Cliff Elegy,” she imagines the grief particular to falling in love like an extended falling scene akin to that of Wile E. Coyote or Alice in Wonderland. There is an elegy for male honeybees dying from orgasm, and one for Emily Dickinson, whose poems are “like grenades that fit in the hand.” Stone also explores the grief in families. The stunning eighteen-page, twelve-part poem “Blue Jays” makes associative leaps, linking her mother to a blue jay, portraying her as both a source of grief and “so much joy.”
I love my mother, the way I love birds.
The blue jay always
is the biggest bird around the bird feeder—makes
strange loud songs,
a little aggressive, but gorgeous, known
for its intelligence and complex social systems
with tight family bonds, a biblical fondness for acorns,
spreading oak trees into existence
after the last glacial period.
What a celebration of motherhood: those flawed and forceful women who made you who you are and who are sometimes the source of sadness. The mother is Stone’s mother, and mine, and all of our ungentle and irreplaceable mothers.
Stone’s book has still more enlarging to do as her grief comes to include the American patriarchy that causes pain for all of us. In an early poem, Stone proudly accepts the tacit belief that a woman being loyal to her own creative genius entails “unfaithfulness” to her husband. Stone commands, “Ladies, enjoy the pleasures of your own mind! The creative woman in this living patriarchy wants to be both object and subject of creation. Blow up your television, love me instead, my genius says to me.” In the later half of the collection, Stone gets more pointed about this toxic American culture, comparing the world to “a wolf tied to a flower [. . .] Something too violent / is attached to something / so living.” In “Ones Who Got Away with It,” she recalls a bulimic thirteen-year-old girl who was “shared” by a frat boy and his friends, and who decided to be proud of what happened to her. Stone envisions those men now, “important men, I imagine. Men who now run conglomerates / and have well-to-do families. Or maybe men I see / every day at work. Or whose books I read.” She’s shining a light on the reality and daring us to acknowledge our own complicity. When I read this poem, I felt pissed off and heartbroken and alive, which is the point; Stone says “do something drastic / like live and live and live.”
Stone’s poems ultimately draw a connection between a toxic, patriarchal paradigm and today’s American system. “Nothing burns quite like the System. It comes at you / when you ask for help, displaying its super-talons / around a clutch of arrows, saying No.” The image of the patriotic, arrow-clutching eagle refusing our needs seems insurmountable. The final long poem responds directly to our current era, where “Trump . . . oils his way across the tangible world.” In this final elegy, Stone balances hopelessness with fierce determination. She asks herself about the collection, “Why am I writing this psychosexual opus to the mind of my women?” Because, Bianca, we need to hear it. We need all the inspiration we can get right now. In this poem, Stone gets as close as she can to an “answer” to the particular grief of women which is: “we must invent, while living a life: / nothing irrelevant here, nothing stopping you—invent! / invent! / invent! / stretch out / a social destiny!” It is through the “genius” or the creativity of women—grandmas, mothers, daughters—that we can find some salvation or solace. It’s poetry itself that gives us our agency and helps us overcome our multitude of grief.
Review originally published in Kenyon Review: https://www.kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-mobius-strip-club-of-grief-by-bianca-stone-738439/
ben_t_g's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
fast-paced
4.0
The fashion of contemporary poetry tends to oscillate between narrative first person and experimental thought exercises. The early aughts were full of the latter, now we’re at the other end of the pendulum. The thing about purely experimental work is it’s easier to mimic and to mistake stuff that’s half-baked for good. The narrative stuff, often - but not always - couched in identity is easier to suss out, but more naked, and lord knows there’s a ton of identity-based poetry that’s compelling for its subject, but not its execution. Sorry for the preamble.
This is an excellent balance of fully realized weirdness laid out pretty traditionally. It could’ve been written in a 90s workshop, yet the language and thematic concerns are fresh. Hence the Ashbery quote on the back, I guess. And hence why this dinosaur enjoyed it, the way I enjoy a post-punk revival band.
This is an excellent balance of fully realized weirdness laid out pretty traditionally. It could’ve been written in a 90s workshop, yet the language and thematic concerns are fresh. Hence the Ashbery quote on the back, I guess. And hence why this dinosaur enjoyed it, the way I enjoy a post-punk revival band.
weonna's review against another edition
4.0
My grief collects tips in a rusted tin can at the Mobius Strip Club of Grief.