A Review By Wayne F. Burke
Brain Lace, by Karina Bush
Publisher: Bareback Press. 46 pgs
The speaker of these poems comes on as machine, technological and teleological. A disembodied voice fiercely feminine, ferocious of appetite (“I am the archer/And the arrow”). A voice of sibylline quality, wise and patient: the voice of conjurer and magician who takes the reader on an eroticized journey that touches, almost incidentally, on archetypal foundations of instinctual nature (symbolized in the verse by horse, spider, and snake).
Poems emerge from an ether, like erotic narcoleptic dreams; like fecund hypnopompic reveries…Karina can tell it “slant,” through use of metaphor and indirection, like an Emily Dickinson, or tell it otherwise–like it is–without allusive language. In the poem “Disease” we get fellatio by any other name; in “Act I,” and elsewhere, the beast with two backs appears; in “Four Faces” cohabitation consists of “Bastard You/Ugly Me/Nice you/Nice me…We throb perverse/The four of us…” Conditions indistinct described in “The Tint” as “Months of/Fuck blur…” More overtly poetic lines–“This hot satin afternoon/Room evaporates into”–mix with less overt: “In my head/Fuck You/Too much…”
Both Eros and eroticism are found here. A powerful collection mesmerizing in its primal energy.
Horror Sleaze Trash 