Spider Rodeo, by Daliah Angelique

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Creepy-cute and silly-somber, Spider Rodeo is a carnivalesque romp through girlhood, weaponizing camp and kitsch to examine trauma, alienation, and gendered violence. Susan Sontag writes that "to perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater." Spider Rodeo metabolizes repressed feminine rage into a maniacal yet droll performance of Womanhood as rigged game, as perverse glamor, as B-movie horror show rippling with eroticism.

The poems within this collection subvert socially prescribed Good Girl sensibilities. Instead, these poems relish in the grotesque, finding pleasure and queer joy along the edge of transgression in a culture dominated by boring and fangless neoliberal hegemony. Embracing the shadowy impulse to “go feral”, Spider Rodeo invites you along for an unhinged playdate in the psychic wasteland of late capitalist popular culture.

Much like the imagery conjured up by the title, Spider Rodeo is a dark feminine ritual of trashy Americana, in equal parts delicate, tender, hilarious, weird, and hypnotic. In an era saturated with loneliness and data, each poem is an unflinching act of confessional, of witnessing, of literary exorcism. Come along and dance!

Daliah Angelique is a Pisces moon lesbian writing about queer womanhood, trauma, and late capitalist dreamscapes. Her work has appeared in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Driftwood Press, Oyster River Pages, Lammergeier, Goats Milk Magazine, The Calliope Script, Spilt Milk - The Poetry Society of New York, and Off Menu Press. She enjoys collecting oddities and kewpie dolls, reading critical theory and tarot cards, cooking, and rollerskating. She lives with her wife and chihuahua in the Pacific Northwest.