Green Knife

Author: Stella Corso

Publisher: Rescue Press (2023)

Framed on the wall of our mordant, modern living, Stella Corso’s evocative second collection, Green Knife, hangs firmly askew. In this annular and focused suite of poems, the flaneur’s gaze is provoked by—and attuned to—its caustic surroundings: a therapist comparing their client to a painting; a subject reflecting on numerous imagined projections; our speaker walking around and around it all (as if in an exhibition hall), cataloguing how humanity's absurdity shifts and blooms based on the eye’s moods. With humor and heart, and with an acerbically piercing tone, Corso claims the world “is alive and well. If you care / to look." We just have to be willing to “submit to the image // with courage.”

“Stella Corso's Green Knife is an investigation into the world as an artifact of thinking or an investigation into thinking as something made by the world as a whole. The book's ostensible subject is art and the humans who precede and follow it in time—and, again, the obverse: the objects that oscillate in semi-permanence around the ephemeral human host. With its double blade of incision and bluntness, Stella Corso's Green Knife could be made of anything—the whole world, vision, light.”

—Joyelle McSweeney