"One of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time."—Dwight Garner, New York Times “In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked, and often funny.” —Publishers Weekly Chelsey Minnis’s new collection of poems follows the struggle of a flawed character in a cinematic world. Playing with old ideas of wealth and love from Holly wood’s golden era, these poems flirt with nostalgia without ever succumbing to it, casting a new light on the present through the fantasies of the past. What do you want with me? I’m just a dirty little shoplifter. I’m like a woman in a sequined gown in a dark cave. Can you tell me I’m worse than others? OK, yes, I’m worse than others, but can you say I’m the worst of all? Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.

"Bad Bad" moves the unabashedly juvenile persona elliptically constructed in Zirconia into a seriously amusing, unblushing womanhood. The poems are equally clownish and fuck-offish, taking on with equivocal weightlessness the lexicons and trimmings of fashion, as it applies to the Self and the garments that clothe the Self, and self-obliteration, as experienced through immersion in the delights and disgust of the Other. "come on the revulsion, the revulsion, when you bring it home, like seafoam, when you bring it home...," she writes, in an ecstacy of encounter. Minnis addresses the inner needs of the poet - "the purpose of poetry is to seem as lifelike as possible so that you actually exist" - and is everywhere concerned with the denotation of that which is true and necessary to the true and necessary poet. "it is a poem, which is a trough, where you can make your reputation, as a stiff, anyway, I am not trying to be human anymore, I am trying to be smart...in the head...like a pissant...".