End of Pink

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of Rag & Bone, which won the 2010 Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Central Missouri, where she also serves as the director of Pleiades Press. She has received research grants from the American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life.

• The Symbolical Head as When Was the Last Time?…7More Experiments with the Mysterious Property of Animal Magnetism (1769) …. 9Zoontological Sublime … 12About Derrida, If You’re into That …. 16Bat Boy Washed Up on Shore …. 19Benjamin Harding to Prospective Investors on the Refining Effects of Static Electricity and Volcanic Action in the Ultimate Production of Both Atomic (or Molecular) and FREE Pure Metallic Gold (1838) … 21 Testimonial (1888)…. 23P. T. Barnum’s Figi Mermaid Exhibition as I Was Not the Girl I Think I Was …. 25I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point, I Concede the Point … 27Wonders and Mysteries of Animal Magentism Displayed (1791) as What I Want Is … 29Rituals of the Bacabs as the Strange Case of Kate Abbott … 31Birds of Ohio …. 33Reading Drops of Water: Showing the Mysteries of the Visible World (1873) as Love Poem … 34The Book of Knowledge, the Experienced Farrier, &c. (1793) as The Best of All Possible Worlds … 36The End of Pink … 38~The Saint Girl’s Sweetest Tortures… 40The Saint Girl Died and Went to Heaven and That Was One Problem After Another … 41Ways In Which the Saint Girl Is and Is Not Me; Also So What If She Is and What If She Isn’t … 42The Saint Girl Discovers an Orgasmitron … 44The Saint Girl Tries to Do the Right Thing … 45The Saint Girl’s Isochronal Error … 46The Saint Girl Takes in Strays … 47The Saint Girl Opens the Window and Closes It as She Pleases … 48The Nimbuses of Devils … 49~Or Perhaps Not … 51My First Peacock … 52Property Lines … 53When Cortez Came …. 55Little Brown Jug, Look on the Bright Side …. 56My Peacock among the Phantasmagoria … 57Whatever You Need … 60Toad … 62My Peacock’s Daguerrotype … 64Peter, Raised by Wolves (1726) … 67Rene Descartes and the Clockwork Girl … 70Peacock and Sister …. 73Little Lesson on How to Be … 74

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award "The remarkable designs of a landscape created by Kathryn Nuernberger give us such a stamp of hoof, wonder, and wit--so much wisdom and understanding of what it means to truly fling your body into the world. This is an unforgettable collection of sly-sexy poems of desire, grief, and motherhood, finally offering up the 'truth of it, the refracted light and blooming anemones of it, the red / coral and unfurling starfish of it.' But perhaps the greatest gift from The End of Pink is the insistence of 'how very emerald joy is, how very leafed with lapis and gilding'--a passionate aide-memoire to hold off a surrender to the dark." --Aimee Nezhukumatathil "I love the ways in which The End of Pink confronts the idea of wisdom, and deftly deconstructs it. When is fable and myth more accurate than science? When does graybearded public authority submit to the wisdom of messy, private experience? How does the wisdom of the book measure up against the wisdom of the body--the female body especially? What do we do when our everyday language fails to represent reality? Poetry, of course, is the answer to this last question, and it is the poetry of Kathryn Nuernberger in particular that makes a place for us in our uncertainty. Not a safe place, not a place of comfort, but a place of surreal, dark beauty that knows us all the same." --Nicky Beer "This a collection of extraordinary resolve, a book that works through emotional turmoil with a steadfast earnestness that resists privatizing pain at the same time it refuses to make something clever or ostentatious with it. The result is a refreshing innovation on the confessional that reads as easily as a conversation with a friend over a drink while still surprising us with new connections, illuminations, and affecting enactments of psychological healing." -- NewPages