National Poetry Month Celebration: Beatriz Hausner
Our National Poetry Month Celebration continues with Beatriz Hausner! Today is the official publication day for Beatriz’s latest poetry collection, Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart, and we’re excited to share a sneak peek from the book. Happy Book Birthday to Beatriz and Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart!
From wistful romance to explicit sex, these poems concern themselves with various aspects of Eros. In praise of Hausner’s latest, Tamara Faith Berger writes, “Elegant, thirsty and visionary poems, echoing with song. Hausner works at the height of her clairaudient powers, depicting the beloved ‘shackled to strange furniture’ to satisfy a relentless, engulfing, transhistorical love.” Aaron Tucker adds, “Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart has a timeless quality to it, slipping between chronologies and myths, simultaneously celestially large and at the scale of a single goosebump. The erotics at its core are epic, musical, sensual, all the while never losing the intimacy of a couple straddling their tandem pains and pleasures.”
Signal alert: Join us on Zoom for the virtual launch of Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart on Thursday, April 30, at 7pm. For more information, visit the FB event page here. To RSVP, please email hazel@bookhugpress.ca.
And now, onto today’s poem. Click on the video to watch Beatriz read the poem “High Priestess” and follow along with the text below.
High Priestess
Our revered lords ladies dear ones I am come to render elegant
homage to silks sometimes chains due to the reversal of the bias.
The principal altar is up side down. Divine Adoratrice of Amun
you of the easy knit interacting with the holder of the office, use
yourself as inspiration in moiré and the shimmery legs strutting
down the aisle: May the perfect fabrications reach up to you because
nothing detracts from the treatment the modality of those fabrics
draped against hardware. You command our attention to the mirror
of ourselves your subjects. Because you must on your own place
the ethereal layers and it is necessary to conceal your love of these
the mothers of the children hanging off us women who accept
the wearing of garments for our Lord Love of perfect fit. Around
us rise the hanging gardens of Babylon and Alexander who saw
them and mistakenly fled along the grain yes against the grain for
he knew not the power of adjuration entreaty renewed twice yearly
when we sat along the long path and praised the importance of the
collar to Amun God’s Wife you are God’s Wife of Amun they call
you more than all the vestals at the altar you alleviate suffering and
the sisters moan in a blessed tone as the trombone groans with the
seasons of irreverence are we renewed spring summer fall and
winter the collections are with the art of being from which we animate
ourselves. I entreat you: do nothing don’t do anything to your genders
of sex for him not the fulfillment of desire nor the satisfying
of want though getting to coming requires great creative power
and the constant invention of writing where pleasure is a present
couture placed against ready-to-wear for the young ones who
work seamlessly and in heels. The young secretariat records
your dictum: I belong to a world devoted to elegance. The
manner of your prayer makes us the thing that most suits you
from which flows our cosmology and structure and softness and
masculine and feminine sometimes the unflattering silhouettes
of ugly chic luxury albeit not basted but rather shirred so
that normalizing the unexplored when designing on paper
when fabricating when draping when cutting when sewing
when finishing the fabric is the medium. Pre-eminently
wearable with the figure dictating the shape of those garments
you offer your chest of accessories drawers that open
and close of their own will overflowing fruit crushed
in a glass of blue of green jewels inside alcohol. We
travel in a car pulled by two lapdogs whose names are
princely.
A designer also this Theodora your sister of now utilizing
whole with no exterior construction to force the dress into
place—and you must be patient. You must surpass yourself
to reach your goals—you utter as the flame is lit and you close
your eyes in prayer pull the flame to your cheeks with your
hands and kiss the deities invisibly protecting us warrior
women in file we parade before you, we who are
fierce and strong, impenetrable owners of our sex.
Remember to follow along all month as we celebrate our poets by sharing a poem each day on the Book*hug Blog. Follow us as well on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.
Beatriz Hausner has published several poetry collections, including The Wardrobe Mistress, Sew Him Up, and Enter the Raccoon (Book*hug, 2012) Selected poems and chapbooks of hers have been published internationally and translated into several languages. Hausner is a respected historian and translator of Latin American Surrealism, with recent essays published in The International Encyclopedia of Surrealism in 2019. Her translations of César Moro, the poets of Mandrágora, as well as essays and fiction by legends like Aldo Pellegrini and Eugenio Granell have exerted an important influence on her work. Hausner’s history of advocacy in Canadian literary culture is also well known: she has worked as a literary programmer in Toronto, her hometown, and was Chair of the Public Lending Right Commission. She is currently President of the Literary Translators’ Association of Canada, a position she held twice before.
