Sex Machines

"Desolately polychromatic & technological, porcelain & pink, the un-care- bearesque low hanging fruit of Jamie Townsend’s perfervid and earnest Sex Machines isn’t entirely 'a rainbow against extinction' nor a colossal countenance in its bacchanality. Their exfoliating voluptuous words are verdant, pop-culture awake, lunar, patinated, mostly tender and at other times a 'heavy scrotum of hosiery and pearls.' With so much darkness, laced with 'sartorial sorrow,' in this world, Jamie Townsend’s sinuous poetry, ancient and modern in its cultural symmetry, is that surrogate light that could unwrap dusk and gloom and make our desire bald with every single sudden cloudburst from their magnificent soul."

—Vi Khi Nao

"These are like poems written in lipstick on a steamy mirror, and you’re looking at yourself and seeing is reading and reading is seeing the smeary lipstick on and not on your mouth, like being with Venus in freefall, sumptuous Venus who 'always works without a net.' Where the meta- phors are always mixed. Louche, circumspect, utterly abundant, glam to the max, an auncient goth brooding on mall-days, blooming w/ neogen- der/z, and with their lover totally 'extra,' blooming the way oil does—on surfaces. The way good coffee 'blooms,' or a flower opens, all ass, all heliotrope, but then also goth/s eating the pussy of the earth in rapturous moonlight."

—Julian Talamantez Brolaski

"With these exquisite Sex Machines, Jamie Townsend gives us the Baroque energy of a painted rose casually opening onto a profane, profound, ornate, and complex realm where 'we don’t have to choose.' Epiphanies occur, are recognized and undermined. Desire, identity, love, fun, and tragedy vie for our attention as Townsend proves there is a sexuality to fate, 'an effacement of its ongoing effacement.' Sonorous and seductive, Sex Machines might just reveal the 'culmination of your basest fantasy' where 'We can all go fuck ourselves.' Read them and weep."

—Laura Moriarty