dollop, the debut poetry collection by Christina Svenson, is perfumed with fantasy, with ennui... with Mugler's Angel.
Drawing inspiration from 19th century cleaning manuals and 1980’s cookbooks, Svenson transgresses etiquette with a pessimism that attempts to reconcile itself through finding beauty and recluse in the absurd. Domestic toil assumes the form of devotional distraction. It is a labor that catalyzes its own appetite, reducing the trope of the housewife to a container, hollow like the salt shaker emptied out over the shoulder and onto the sand.
The immateriality of fantasy itself is consuming —
it 'can never be held/ that's why it matters/ so much'.
dollop is a fantasy that serves as an inflatable cushion for the inundating solitude that comes with waiting, with being Penelope, with being Lot's wife... inundating, and so conclusive in its desperate attachment to the always receding edge of the pacific.
