Description
Emily Corwin’s sensorium is a gurlesque party, is lush and anxious and blossoming with rot. In her second collection, Corwin investigates the textures of physical and psychic pain―the celluloid of classic horror films, greasy computer screens and text messages, ballrooms and hallways and pig blood, surgical instruments, lipsticks, medication, teenage romance and demons. Sensorium considers the beauty in body horror, the viscera boiling under a pretty crust.
About the Author
Emily Corwin is a recent graduate of the MFA program at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Ninth Letter, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press), which were published in 2016. Her first book, tenderling, was released in 2018 from Stalking Horse Press. She lives and teaches in Michigan.
Praise for sensorium
“When you enter Emily Corwin’s sensorium, you will be overcome. We’re pinned against an understanding that “maybe I was / made for this soft tissue” as we wade through various traumata: the eye-bleed caused by social media, anxiety disorder management, and the spectacle of horror heroines confronting “What culprit? / What creature or vertebrae clacking / there.” Yet alongside fear, there is tenderness here for us, “my honeydew,” with glittering resilience. sensorium“unwrapped my everything & I am riven” with my own sensations toward the lush reckoning Corwin offers toward the “animalcule” of our softer selves and assurance that “there is glinting still for seeing.” –Carly Joy Miller
“In Emily Corwin’s unforgettable second book, sensorium, mythology and technology meet in the middle of the brain’s digital gala. This ornate, visceral collection explores the frustration and wonder that comes out of the packets of data and sequined threads of text that reframe our algorithmic lives. At the same time, Corwin’s striking poems are suffused with the tensions of the interior world caused by this screen-time scaffolding. They turn the public performances of the self inside out so that all of the arteries, bones, and metaphoric innards are in full view. There is no place to hide—not for the speakers of the poems or for us—from the relentlessness of our pop culture screens, our medias, and the mythologies we try to build for ourselves from them.” –Adrian Matejka
