TRAVIS SHARP YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
NOW AVAILABLE AS A DOWNLOAD HERE & at ASTERISM BOOKS.
"REMARKABLE. Sharp's YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER offers us a unique work of ill/queer goretesquerie, of body-embodying body-first verse that pairs nicely with a glass of something fruitfully heady like, say, Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception … Polyvalent, webby, thrust in many directions at once to the reader’s delight." - bonnyCD, The Temz Review (Sept 2025)
"Sharp’s language is thick, racy, sensual, ruckous and uniquely physical, upturning tables with a flamboyance... YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER is an impressive debut" - @robmclennanblog
TRAVIS SHARP
YES, I AM A CORPSE FLOWER
KFB. Poetry.
ISBN 978-1-989355-27-5
Print run sold out.
Digital Download (PDF Format)
Yes, I am a corpse flower composes a queer lyric meditation on body, identification, and subjectivity, proposing a queer poetics not just referential, limited to language’s meaning. These are not poems about queerness, but composed queerly: eccentric, off-centre, oblique, to twist. Poems that failingly and flailingly attempt to define the queer “I,” that skepticize any stable connection between queer self and body, narrate an unnarratable encounter with self-recognition outside of categorizable identity. These poems are composed from a feeling that to state queerness can never be to expound on a single journey, but to gather together a multitude of I’s of which this I, here, writing this paragraph, is only one iteration. I is not this one, but neither is I an other, but a we, perversely licked-linked through language, a sort of tongue: limn me, limn me!
Published by knife | fork | book, March 2021, (now out of print) reissued here as an ePub (pdf download) in its entirety, with original design by r. kolewe.
Contents
Yes, I am a corpse flower
Sinister Queer Agenda
The body under valuation: a musical
I guess we should talk about our feelings
Protean Shakes: A Memoir
OrganGrindrTM
Acknowledgements/Bio
TRAVIS SHARP is the author of the lyric documentary poem sequence Monoculture (Unicorn Press 2024) and the poetry collection Yes, I am a corpse flower (Knife Fork Book 2021). A former postdoctoral fellow at the University at Buffalo, he is currently a lecturer in the writing program at Howard University. Since 2019, he is the executive editor at Essay Press.