Boys Fight

Boys Fight—an artist book by poet Marina Tëmkina and sculptor Michel Gérard—is a response to the emergence of violent factions and nationalist movements over the past decade. These poems and drawings join forces for a “direct hit to the stomach.”

Tëmkina’s fifteen-stanza poem is a rush of language: short, brusque bursts of sentences collapsing into chagrin and exasperated exegesis, conversational asides and digressive laments indexing the traits, facts, and ways in which men, unceasingly, compete. One finds a taxonomy of masculinity in her inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, driven, and treating the world as “a huge fighting ring / an enormous battlefield / an unlimited war zone.”