Excerpts from Jacqueline Kari’s poetry manuscript, TWA: A Masque, finalist for the 2015 TS Book Prize.
Click to read Section 4: “Reginasis” (PDF file)
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jacqueline Kari is a poet and translator. The author of two chapbooks, The Book of Tell (dancing girl press) and Litel Myn Tragedye (Birds of Lace, forthcoming fall 2015), her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Action Yes, Lana Turner, The Cambridge Literary Review, RealPoetik, Caketrain, and elsewhere. This fall, she will be a PhD candidate at the University of Georgia. She lives in Athens, Georgia, where she makes Montessori curriculum materials and serves as poetry editor for A Bad Penny Review/Opo Books & Objects.
AUTHOR STATEMENT
TWA: A Masque picks apart the bones of the Child ballad, “The Twa Sisters,” reinterpreting its tale of sororicide and retribution as a a masque that glitters with constellations of love triangles, a katabatic trip to graveland, and the yoked fates of two sisters twinned from their balladic, fairy-tale archetypes and sent out in period-stained pieces to act and react, yank apart the seems, and repeat. This excerpt finds our heroine, Ginny, back from hell with blood on her breath, refusing to sing for a Miller who’s rotten to the corps. TWA is a crime scene. TWA is a love story. TWA is excess of it, played on and on.
Additional work from this project can be viewed at Dreginald, Smoking Glue Gun, Tenderloin, & Caketrain.