Luxury, Blue Lace by S. Brook Corfman, winner of the Rising Writer Prize, takes the reader through this complicated experience of selfhood and its multitudes, exploring the many overlapping identities a single person can contain.
Corfman’s poems conjure a host of identities and selves both living and dead, gesturing towards the complex way memory and loss can inhabit us. Formed by experience, history, and the strictures of gender, the poems dwell on the challenges of fully knowing and understanding the diverse parts of a subject. While they seek out a full form for the individual, they also relish the complex multiplicity of the identities that arise through self-exploration and self-knowledge.