Ragtag Giggagon

US writer Kristin Garth has a Medium site where she hosts a number of impressive poems that focus on gender dynamics, misogyny, romance, psychopathy, BDSM and more. A chapbook of some of her poetry, Pink Plastic House, will be published by Maverick Duck Press in 2018. How are things? What are you up to? I'm doing pretty good. I’ve had some work solicited so I have been doing that, and my Medium work. How about you? Good thanks. Is it always poetry? Have you tried writing fiction or memoir? I have written an unfinished BDSM romance and a weird novel about a young teenage (18) year old stripper. Your work strikes me as being a little Lady Gaga, based on what I know of her iconography at her gigs etc, inasmuch as it seems to feature lots of sex and death! Your poetry occasionally deals in both – your talk of the body etc, and you don’t shy away from misogyny and abuse.  I’m doing an Amazon Kindle short fiction collection at the moment. You ought to put a Kindle book of poetry tog...

Mild spoilers: The most creative "Destroy the Death Star" type plan since Return of the Jedi is thrown away in this sequel. In terms of such plans, it's not derivative the way ROTJ, The Fanta Lemon, or Abrams's's efforts are. For originality alone, it is worthy, although it has a dash of the chase after the Falcon in Empire Strikes Back. Beyond that, though, the fact that this movie can afford to toy with viewer expectations in such a fashion is a breakthrough. And beyond pissing this subplot against the wall of the trash compactor Finn and Rose don't escape through, the movie confounds expectations in other ways. This is ultimately impressive. There's social commentary, particularly at the movie's end, a look at what constitutes a hero as things are femsplained to Poe, and a terrific performance from Benecio del Toro.

The - - Ladies and gentlemen I give you the Microwave Egg Poacher. Simply place your egg into the containment unit, set the microwave for one of your earth minutes, and once the timer alerts you to the fact that your minute is up, open the oven door. The egg will be GONE! How is it poached exactly? A kind of sped-up slow-cooking process? A temperature adjustment of some kind midway through? No way man! No way, you idiot! Using anti-drip technology and harnessing the powers of quantum entanglement, a portal sends the egg out to the Land of the Grogochs, and one of them receives the egg in his firetop pot, whereupon he or a close family member gobbles up that poached egg pretty quickly. What - pray tell - is a Grogoch? YOUR NEW PENPAL! For a small subscription fee, your sponsored grogoch will send you letters and photos direct to your online device, showing you how much he appreciates your eggs. Grogochs are fairies who have lived in Ireland for thousands of years, originally from Scotla...

In a Medium piece by the often insightful Roxane Gay , she says she was attacked online for being dismissive of domestic abuse because she found the show Big Little Lies derivative. (From the context, that's like being accused of being pro-murder because you don't like CSI.) She later says Trump's cries of fake news allow genocidal regimes like Myanmar's to use the same phrase to deny their atrocities. But but but... 1. Gay discusses how people attribute things to her which they've no right to do. 2. Cries of Fake News had been used ubiquitously (indeed, perhaps more by the Left than the Right) before Trump took the ball and ran with it. Denial of the ongoing Rohingya genocide cannot be attributed to Trump. (Bill Clinton's affairs were not responsible for Jacob Zuma's polygamy.) 3. Gay later says she's probably used similar lines of reasoning against her online adversaries as they have against her, falsely attributing belief and opinion. (I'd argue s...

All’s fair in love and war, as the Old Fart of Avon, or Stratford, or Wherever TF, once said. (It wasn't Shakespeare though. Okay? Do not attribute that to Shakespeare. He was the Bard. Not the Fart. Also, I just checked attribution.) Bearing that in mind, if there’s a theme permeating Bianca Bowers’ terrific Love is a Song She Sang From a Cage , it’s love, as the title suggests. Although the love on display is not just in the negative sense described by the title, the poems are thematically driven by a loss of love, or love that is less than salubrious in the senses of romance or mutual respect. Whether the poet’s voice is playing the dom or the sub in the relationships described, Bowers is on form with an awesome series of analogies – such as having a remote-controlled heart, or identifying with Sharon Stone’s Basic Instinct character Catherine Trammell. These images are found in two of the darker pieces. Playing out the idea of remote-controlled love, with wires and an eponymo...