This is LA: Didion's, West's, Chandler's -- but it is also Becca Klaver's now, a beautifully-earned poetic residence -- " ... the new city /fire on the asphalt, antics in the firmament". Who knew there were poems this cock-eyed brilliant and convincing ("skate punk Charon sulks and smokes in the canal") to be written about our most spectacularly illusory City? Who knew Klaver was going to burn up Paradise with a full-blown literary style, like a rocket-hot Santa Ana? What a radiant, wickedly-liminal debut, what a star show of sheer talent: hip, lit, hallowed. --Carol Muske-Dukes, Poet Laureate of California
A skeptical fabulist with a penchant for "monomyths" and "mythovarnishes," it is no surprise that one of Becca Klaver's favorite descriptions of L.A. would be Baudrillard's "a town of fabulous proportions, but without space or dimensions." Klaver revels in the interstices between proportion and dimension, jerking the reader while shifting her gaze back and forth from screens of all kinds to the personal space she feistily stakes out. Of course she knows the two are inextricably entwined. As if in cinema's perpetual present, the ghost of L.A. keeps popping up, haunting her debut collection and, fittingly, mesmerizing the reader into a languorous state of mind. --Mónica de la Torre
LA Liminal gives us bright, lively, playful poems, that know how to cross over and under thresholds, perspectives, and transitions. --Joanne Kyger
LA Liminal closely examines what lies beneath the 'glatzy' spectacle of Los Angeles. Readers will enjoy the dryly personal tone, surprising refractions of language, acute sense of metaphor, and humor. Armed with these, Becca Klaver's probing meditations and acerbic wit poke a careful hole through the scummy, glittering surface, to put a cocktail-ringed finger right on the humanity beneath it, until LA functions not just as synecdoche for country and national identity, but becomes a trope for personal identity, and more specifically, a feminine identity rebuilt from the wreckage of failure.
