Spoiled Meat

WINNER OF THE 2018 CHARLOTTE MEW PRIZE

Nicole Santalucia's Spoiled Meat tells the stories of tough and tender survivors chasing freedom in small-town Pennsylvania, reporting from the "thump between the prison yard and the university." Despite the jackknives, confederate trucks, thrown gravel, sour tastes and news, these frank and funny speakers keep vigil with us as the "sky turns pink," as we savor the wonderful and strange landscapes around us.
-Ching-In Chen, judge of the Charlotte Mew Contest

Adrienne Rich says: "A patriot is one who wrestles for the soul her country as she wrestles for her own being." Santalucia's Spoiled Meat are patriotic poems by these and any measure, driven by Santalucia's unmistakable voice and unsparing diction. She holds no punches as a poet, and this latest book sounds dark humor, biting satire-and pathos-at every turn. Spoiled Meat is a tour-de-force of political dissent and lyrical engagement with the core questions of who, as citizens and as a nation, we are and who we want to be.
- Shara McCallum, author of Madwoman

With an avant-garde playfulness and a documentarian's eye, Nicole Santalucia delves into what it feels like to be queer, in love, and awake to the literal and spiritual dangers of making a life in contemporary America. The America of Spoiled Meat is harsh, rural, and surreal "The truck's big tires roll over town, / crush bricks and tombstones, / while bags of dicks bounce around the cargo beds." The speaker of these poems is committed to the joy of purposeful work and the beauty of a shared, queer life though hostile politics can invade any moment, like when the speaker finds on a hot dog "a strand / of orange hair in the mustard." These are complex poems full of imagination and fire. The poetry mothers and fathers of this book, Anne Sexton, Lucille Clifton, Bernadette Mayer, Walt Whitman, Frank O'Hara, among other luminous forbearers, must be smiling.
-Laura Cronk, author of Having Been an Accomplice