Gratefully, Passion: A Review of Purdey Lord Kreiden's Children of the Bad Hour

Poet Purdey Lord Kreiden, French heir-apparent to the transfigured decadence throne, if she wants it, has been reading in New York for the past week with a new chapbook, Children of the Bad Hour (Ugly Duckling Presse 2015). The book is propelled by a charmed prophesy--or as Sarah Nicholson and Jane Gregory have put it: "[H]er work proves true the Blakean proverb, 'To create a little flower is the labour of ages.'" While we're on it, they also write that she "LITERALLY masturbates poems into existence."

To the point: James Wagner has reviewed Children of the Bad Hour at Mobile--a great site for keeping up on contemporary stuffs, by the by--and while he recognizes the calm in the peacock ("[t]here is a calmness in this book, amid all of the derangements of sexuality, and a kind of certainty of tone, a conviction, that is felt"), he also sees well the storm:

Children of the Bad Hour, Purdey Lord Kreiden’s first work, though shocking at times, does not suffer from ... drippings of rearview mirror anxiety. Her work is spirited, ecstatic, and musical .... The poems may read like pornographic fairytales, with dream material woven in, but there is no distance here, like one would have in those tales. Her writing seems very alive, in the present, right here, forceful and playful. This is exciting. Some first books by poets can enter the world a bit unsure of purpose, and then there are some like Kreiden’s, which seem to trumpet out wildly a beguiling urgency, or what may as well just be called, gratefully, passion.

Read it all at Mobile, and keep your eyes peeled for more; or just check it out already.