MANIC PIXIE AMERICAN DREAM, by Bleah Patterson

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features. MANIC PIXIE AMERICAN DREAM is the conclusion to Patterson’s Worm Poem Trilogy, in which queer southern girlhood, religious deconstruction, and growing up on millennial Tumblr is in the self-portrait of a worm. This chapbook, and the two before it, marry literary references along with pop culture and major 2010s style yearning as the speaker navigates grief, love, and questions of personal identity throughout their twenties. By the end, this chapbook, Patterson is coming face to face with the side effect of years of romanticizing (and sometimes pursuing, for the plot) trauma. In poems that confront purity culture, adulthood outside of survival mode, capitalism, American evangelical greed, MANIC PIXIE AMERICAN DREAM investigates all of the ways that humility is required to unlearn ideologies that are built into our society. With her signature jarring, tongue and cheek lengthy titles and lyrical attention to taste, touch, and pleasure Patterson finishes this trilogy with a millennial declaration: It is really that deep. Bleah Patterson is a queer, southern poet from Texas. Much of her work explores the contention between identity and home and has been featured or is forthcoming in various journals including Electric Literature, Pinch, Grist, The Laurel Review, Phoebe Literature, The Rumpus, and Taco Bell Quarterly.