Cynthia Nelson is a great poet. [She] kind of looks like a beatnik and seems very good-natured but she also radiates an incredible edge and does not dawdle.
The beautiful thing about Cynthia Nelson's latest collection of poetry, The Kentucky Rules, is that, for the first time in my albeit limited experience I've finally read some lesbian love, not sex, poetry. The thing is, Nelson didn't (I don't think) set out to write 'lesbian poems,' (I use the term in reservation; there really is no such thing as a 'lesbian poem,' any more than there is a 'white straight male poem.') She wrote love poems that happen to be about the woman she's in love with. The normalization effect this has is powerful.
—John Paul Davis Contemporary Poetry Reviews
The Kentucky Rules Cynthia Nelson illustrated by Tara Jane O'Neill
Paper | 5" x 7" | 118 pgs. | ISBN: 1-887128-26-3 | List: $10.00 | 11/1/1998
Available on Powells.com, Amazon.com, from your local BookSense store, and bookstores everywhere!
About the book:
Indie-rock sensations Cynthia Nelson and Tara Jane O'Neil return to press with a second collaboration in poetry and art, following their acclaimed Soft Skull collection Raven Days. With their band Retsin and books like The Kentucky Rules, Cynthia and Tara have created a body of work that supports an earthy, direct, self-possessed vision.
From the book:
snooze
the alarm makes the same sound every 9 minutes & you & i rotate like rotisserie chickens cooking in bed juice upon skewers of sleep
i'm always done before you, meat sliding off & you cry out hold me, hold onto me, someplace
stephanie rose
she used to spend a lot of time trying to decide if she was a good girl or a bad girl, what it meant to be good what it meant to be bad, & which she was going to be
she makes me think of rose the flower the dark-haired sentinel negative space of a moonbeam
she asked me what i thought & i said good girls, bad girls fleshy earthlings all i find them wry & exciting watch them take off their sneakers
& she just took to it, the scene behind the scene i kept speaking while she slept, dreaming the forbidden for a couple of hours down the road, the folded ribbon
