Ready for the World

Name: Ready for the World
SKU: 978-1-62557-810-5
Price: 16.95 USD
Availability: OutOfStock

Publication Date: February 2020

Description

What does it take for a girl to get ready for the world, and is it ever possible to go back? Ready for the World is a book of poems, spells, performance scripts, and feminist fairytales that derives its magic from tarot and astrology, feminist artist foremothers, and virtual and IRL covens. In her update of the lyric “I” for the digital age, Klaver claims for poetry the trivialized tones of femininity, unwilling to give up on the possibility of an outside to patriarchy as she loops around in cyclical time to access a spirit of magic, play, friendship, and artmaking.

Written in the years Klaver was collaborating on feminist writing, performance, ritual, and activism in person and online in the form of the (G)IRL writing group, The Real Housewives of Bohemia podcast, the Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants website, the Anti-Surveillance Feminist Poet Hair & Makeup Party roving mob, and the Enough Is Enough proto-#MeToo activist collective, Ready for the World explores how alternative practices and communities can resist destructive forms of power and conjure other ways of being and knowing.

Listen to Becca Klaver read from READY FOR THE WORLD // Watch the captioned video on the BLP YouTube Channel

Praise

Becca Klaver’s Ready for the World is a dazzling, brilliant spellbook for femmes, witches, and bad princesses, a survival guide for our gross misogynist times. With poems created from FB girl party message boards to tarot cards to selfies, Ready for the World is major contemporary while still paying honor to feminist conceptual art foremothers like Yoko Ono, who taught us the power of words, of wishes. “A wish is not a luxury” Klaver writes, “They will tell you you can have no more wishes / And yet we wish well of course we wish.” Klaver’s spells and wishes give me permission, give me life.

-Kate Durbin

“A reverse exorcism”. Ready for the World is on the astrological cusp of Cancer and carcinogen, analog experience and clickable fantasy. With her selfie timer set, Becca Klaver takes our hand and skips us through an Insta feed looking-glass into an introspective grimoire. The girly spectral speakers of the “pink geometry” mapped in these poems stake their own subjectivity in packs, through ritual and performativity and raucous laughter. Whether your own adolescence was blissfully full of besties who Ouija’ed yourselves out of the patriarchy or not, you can “get that teenage feeling back” with this tricked-out book. Call in the four elements and stand by for the headrush of magic.

-Arielle Greenberg

About the Author

Becca Klaver

Becca Klaver is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press, 2010), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books, 2016), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press, 2020), as well as several chapbooks. Her most recent publications are the collaborative book Midwinter Constellation (Black Lawrence, 2022) and the chapbook of postcard poems Greetings from Bowling Green (The Magnificent Field, 2022). Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Fence, jubilat, Verse Daily, and in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day series. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, co-edited the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She has taught at colleges and universities around the U.S., and is currently the Program Manager for the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. You can find more at beccaklaver.com.