Jesse Darling: Virgins

Monitor Books, Softcover, 21 × 17 cm

Experiential and mapped, Virgins takes us on car rides, through hotel rooms and up close to meat viscera and enamel structures. Oscillating through binaries, concepts of innocence and experience are dragged by their creaturely haunches by ‘gathered clumps’ of characters who play, fight, bathe, fuck and browse on the burning pyre of old ideas.

Virgins is a mnemonic playlist in the washer-dryer drum-hum of trial and error; the experiment in Poetry of poetry’s worldliness, debauchery, and angst. If we “walk the broken line,” as JD suggests, it’s something we do together through underground and under-resourced subculture formations. These are poems to take with you and read aloud in transit, in public spaces, or quietly to your ride and die comrades. These are poems for the real ones.