What To Expect When You’re Expecting the Apocalypse
In Praise of the Visionary Kristin Bock: A Review of Glass Bikini

Imagine in your mind’s eye the opening scene from the movie Blue Velvet, in which the camera pans from a deep blue heaven to white picket fences interlaced with red roses. Recall the lush green suburban lawn that contains, upon closer examination, a perfectly severed human ear. While Blue Velvet’s symbolic juxtaposition of the American facade and all that festers beneath it is not the subtlest cinematic gesture, it is indeed powerful — a daring series of images the mind returns to in scenes one cannot un-see.

But now, Dear Reader, conjure the shot of that perfectly severed ear and imagine, just beyond it, a world in which babies are “born in pieces,” littering the earth with parts that “arose and animated,” “Until one day, scores of baby ears nested inside each/other to form beautiful fleshy dahlias.” [1]

If you conjured correctly, you are now in the world of Kristin Bock’s Glass Bikini (Tupelo Press, 2021), a world in which one can see how, “In the morning, trees in the shape of beautiful dark vaginas had grown/higher than the spires of churches.”[2] And though these trees do not exist on film, they are indeed powerful in the mind’s eye.

The comparison between Bock and Blue Velvet filmmaker David Lynch is an effortless one because, aside from their shared adoration of surrealist hellscapes, they are both undeniably auteurs. Yet I would argue Bock is braver in at least one sense: her work never depends upon the evocation of the nostalgic and the sentimental, those toxic white bookends that hold together the lie of American “innocence.”

Bock’s Glass Bikini universe is one in which Baldwin’s prophecies from “Stranger in the Village” have long since come to fruition. “People who shut their eyes to reality,” Baldwin writes, “simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.” [3]

Well, here we are, friends, in the year 2022, fully enmeshed in the monster mash. And if the Lynchian impulse is to undermine innocence by juxtaposing the sacred and profane, the Bockian impulse is to dice with a razor blade any organism that ever invested in a trope as weak and antiquated as innocence. And with this razor blade, Bock will draw blood, while an evil bot looms overhead, filming the whole thing.

If there’s one thing that unites America as a nation these days, it’s one side blaming the other for the inescapable, war-torn hellscape to which we are seemingly doomed. I see uncanny reflections of our world in many of Bock’s poems, including the oft-quoted “Everything Coming Up Rifles,” in which she writes: “All the crosses/in the graveyard are rifles. The church bell’s tongue is a long,/black rifle.” And, later in the poem: “Our lost lovers/are rifles. Our silhouettes, rifles. Our arms, rifles. The trees are enormous/rifles no one can wrap their rifles around.”

Bock’s genius is in daring to play with language reserved exclusively these days for tired rhetoric and, in doing so, creating a poem that folks on vehemently opposing sides of the aisle could easily adopt as their own personal anthem. She does this without once conceding to either side. And in this way, Bock manages, miraculously, to convey Truth, with a capital “T,” in this post-Truth world to which we’ve grown accustomed.

In the very first line of the very first poem of Glass Bikini, Bock announces the extinction of art. She takes the piss out of the art world metaphorically by evoking the tired tropes of gallery-speak before pissing, quite literally, in the empty space where Duchamp’s “Fountain” was once displayed. In this gesture, Bock is a rockstar who smashes her guitar in the opening number, but not to worry — she just keeps culling forth new guitars. They sprout up like seedlings from the broken frets and snapped strings of the old.

One would be hard-pressed to find a poetry collection jam-packed with lines as sinister and pyrotechnic as those in Glass Bikini. Each time I read through this collection, I have the thought that if the combined genetic materials of Courtney Love and John Waters were implanted in a gestating Mary Shelley, who retained Emily Dickinson as her doula, Glass Bikini would be the sweet baby born.

But I also want to speak to how this collection also (somehow) contains lines imbued with spare and thoughtful elegance, quieter moments that seem often overlooked.

In “The Island of Zerrissenheit,” Bock writes: “I’ve come to know the difference/between sadness and grief. Sadness/is the knell of a bell on a buoy at night/riding the swells. Grief is a boat/exactly the size and shape of the sea.” These lines repeat themselves to me every evening when I look out upon the darkening Gulf. They’ve become the honest articulation of a consoling prayer for me.

And too, there is the beautiful poem, entitled “Postcard From the Coffin” — the first I read from Glass Bikini, the first I fell utterly in love with:

Everything was fine until the flood. Now my suit is ruined, caked with Mud, especially the buttons, which I love. I remember someone at the wake whispered, mother of Pearl. I never met Pearl, though I would like to someday — My dearest Pearl, my snarl of light… How they used to shine, these buttons, even in the dark. Like promises. Like opals buried deep inside the moon.

Dear Reader, Please find me a poetry morsel more delicious than “my snarl of light.” It’s one of the best I’ve come across in my 39 years upon this wretched and soon-to-be-extinct earth.

While the sublime-and-dirty diction of Glass Bikini might not appeal to everyone, the book is truly a masterclass in worldbuilding. There is no other collection in which you will find a razor-sharp mosaic of apocalyptic origin stories, sentient snowmen, teeth-gnashing mermaids, murderous gingerbread men, predatory parents, dolls-turned-drones, and epistolary invitations from Satan, who offers to “leave the moon on/all night among the leaves.”[4]

Dear Reader, buy this book — buy at least two copies — and follow Bock to the ends of the earth, for whatever time we have left. If not for the incredible poetry, than as a kind of guidebook to help you survive when Bock’s grizzly divinations come, in the not-so-distant future, to light.

[1] All three quoted lines from Bock’s “How Rabbits Finally Took Over the World”

[2] Bock, “The Gift”

What To Expect When You’re Expecting the Apocalypse In Praise of the Visionary Kristin Bock: A… was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.