Mauled by Bull Ants Outside the Highpoint Shopping Centre, by Samantha Edith Cooper

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Mauled by Bull Ants is the history of a secret holy war, leaping body to body, of Guilt against Recollection, Frivolity against Deceit, God against Opacity, Squirrels against Farmers.

This narrative travels between geographic coordinates, nexuses of the brain embodied as observers - some silent and washing their hands of the affair, some interrogative and dirty up to the elbow. As they pass the eye between them, a confused exchange takes form, reforms; its stakes becoming clarified and its mission more resolute.

Thus culminates a migration of eels into a moment of God, of loss and love and recapture always present. In Mauled by Bull Ants, you have your cake and eat it, too.

The work is pseudo-ekphrastic in concept, yet attempts to transcend this concept altogether. Navigating through allusion to musical inspirations - including and especially the title of the piece, a lyric from Tropical Fuck Storm's song "You Let My Tyres Down" - what commences as a cacophony of antagonistic cherub voices transforms into the coagulate of a single, solemn, sacred chant overflowing with frantic love.

Please, have a seat, and make yourself at home. Dinner is almost ready.

Samantha Edith Cooper is a fiction writer and poet working out of Chicago, Illinois, USA. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Philosophy from DePaul University. Her work has been featured in orangepeel literary magazine and in Hooligan Mag's Spilled Ink column.