I Named the Dragon for You by Nikki Ketteringham

Nikki Ketteringham is a unique talent in today’s literary landscape. Here, in gorgeously crafted minimalist verse, silence is as charged and haunted as the words themselves. White space transforms into a unit of composition, a tool that Ketteringham deploys expertly. The impact of each image, and each stunning turn of phrase, is amplified as the poet gestures at what is left unsaid, all that lies beyond the printed page. This book is as accomplished as it is expansive in its vision of what poetry can be. Brava!

—Kristina Marie Darling, Fulbright Scholar and Author of Daylight Has Already Come

I Named the Dragon for You by Nikki Ketteringham follows the tradition of surrealist mythmaking towards the abject, from John Berryman’s Dream Songs to CA Conrad’s Book of Frank, where sexual transgression goes hand in hand with an Icarian attempt towards true love. The familial saga begins “I named the dragon for you.” We flip the page and learn “his name is Edgar,” who “went crazy last year / Was diagnosed got fat all that.” “Fix my heart/ yeah do that/ fix my heart,” demands the speaker, who attempts to close the distance of “You in your corner of the bed / Me in my corner of the bed” through Edgar with his “[i]nterested yellow eyes.” In page after page of short one to four-line stanzas, Ketteringham performs the perniciousness of internalized misogyny (“I don’t mind changing diapers in fact I love changing diapers/ Well maybe I don’t love it but I don’t mind it”). Ketteringham has composed a striking composition featuring an ingenious plot twist and etched with what it feels like to say, “I like belonging to something not someone,” but stay.

—Tiffany Troy, author of Dominus

Nikki Ketteringham’s I Named the Dragon for You is a beautifully sustained, thought-provoking
hybrid text presented in minimal poems concerning a relationship with a dragon. Akin to Rachel Ingalls’s, Mrs. Caliban, or Bear, by Canadian author Marian Enge, Ketteringham engages the absurdities of life, imagination, relationships, boundaries, and belonging.

—Geoffrey Gatza

Nikki Ketteringham’s minimalist hybrid poetry about a woman’s relationship with an imagined dragon is the springboard for reflections on boundaries, desire, and sex. The text comes alive through her syntax, verbal brevity, rhythm, lack of punctuation, and playfully naming a psychoemotional edge.

—Cheryl Pallant

Nikki Ketteringham lives in California with her husband and son. This is her first book of poetry.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 62 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-457-4