Heretic Bastard

Caseyrenée Lopez's heretic bastard revels in a poetry enriched by its source text, not harnessed by it. Lopez has crafted a world both opulent and grim: "golden domes...[and] gilt cages" juxtapose "silent monuments" and together breathe a vampiric ethos.

Blood is "necessary" in Lopez's world: a sacrifice and a promise of eternity, a scrim of violence soaking the city... Death breathes down the throat of the speaker, "a universal tongue / dark portals of gleaming coral," and renders the dark spectacularly alive, "a peacock made of blood."

In a voice both scorned and ethereally queer, heretic bastard is a love song to the unseen. These little poems labor towards a form of memory scorched into the body, the visceral and sensual memory of luster and coercion, the spot you can never scrub out. Lopez has discovered this place and beckons for us to join them.

-Jesse Rice-Evans