The Buff by Anne Marie Rooney

34 pages. Tape-bound.

 

Silicone trenches. Gold amphitheaters. Whole red rivers. The clouds, the clouds, the clouds. Through the gutpunch sentences of these twenty-eight pieces you’ll get taken to stark, secret places. It’s not so much the beauty you’ll find there as it is the horror, the cold sweat. This is The Buff. This is surrealism’s new texture. “It was a strange world,” this narrator insists, “and I was in it.”

Anne Marie Rooney’s first book, Spitshine, is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press. She is the recipient of the Iowa Review Award, the Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and the Amy Award, and her writing has appeared in the Best New Poets and Best American Poetry anthologies. Born and raised in New York City, she recently earned her M.F.A. from Cornell University, and currently lives in New Orleans with her partner. Anne Marie hopes to live in a lighthouse when she grows up.