Grappling with queerness and trauma from Alberta to Brooklyn, powering through body, sex, and gender to hit free open roads, in Vulgar Mechanics, K. B. Thors seeks to invent new strategies for survival through the two most basic tools available to the speaker: language and the body. The poems celebrate the body as a vehicle of excavation and self-determination in a world in which there may be no such a thing as a safe word.
Discover Vulgar Mechanics through the excerpt below and read K.B. Thors’ thoughts on the passage.
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All the Rage
(The following excerpt is the final portion of the poem, which is the last poem in the book)
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“All the rage” is a funny expression. I often wonder about the tells in our language and the origins of phrases — I figure they must give something away about human nature and personality. The idea of rage as fashionable or of the moment was a way for me to poke fun at the forces in the book, the heavy grief and love and anger. The book’s closing poems reflects that finding-our-footing that eventually comes after loss, the insistence of joy and adventure, despite and because of life’s mess. This poem always felt like it should be the last one in the book, a reflection on what just happened.
There are no pat endings in poetry, but this poem is an arrival in a place I hope others recognize. You know those moments where it feels like you understand yourself even a smidge better? The human animal has always loved and lost. We hurt, we get confused, we grow stronger. Sometimes you gotta kick a rock just to get moving—I’m a big fan of how these bodies we’re in help us process. Unhinging here felt bodily and emotional, a dismantling of my understanding of myself in the gendered, violent, gorgeous world, and a coming back around on my own terms. I got thrown for a loop, and used my legs to keep swinging to get to a more nuanced, stable vantage point. I might still be off kilter, but through these poems I was able to see beauty I hadn’t before, that had been there all along.
K. B. Thors
To continue reading, purchase Vulgar Mechanics here!
K.B. Thors is a poet, translator, and educator from rural Alberta, Canada. Her translation of Stormwarning (Phoneme, 2018) by Icelandic poet Kristín Svava Tómasdóttir won the American Scandinavian Foundation’s Leif and Inger Sjöberg Prize and is currently nominated for the PEN Literary Award for Poetry in Translation. She is also the Spanish-English translator of Chintungo: The Story of Someone Else by Soledad Marambio (Ugly Ducking Presse, 2018). Her poems, essays and literary criticism have appeared around the U.S., U.K., and Canada. She has an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow in Poetry.
Visit her website. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram.
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