Dragstripping, Jan Beatty's seventh collection of poems, takes readers to the literal dragstrip, the metaphorical dragstrip of the body, and the strip club, where the ecstatic is rescripted and where women disappear and reappear in the crosscut of gender. Transgressing into and out of poetic form, Beatty writes the fractured landscape of the unknown woman, breaking rules of grammar and subverting expected speech, mixing the real and unreal, and finding elation in a strange and shifting land.
"Jan Beatty writes at full throttle, a plunge into the self without flinching. These poems are highways, the finish lines smoking with 'the truth that drags and bitters.' Stories stripped raw. Brave, honest, death-defying, Beatty's poetry roars."
Sandra Cisneros, author of Woman without Shame
"Jan Beatty has written a wildly associative and resolutely secular rebel's 'lives of the saints'-one in which her love for rock and the blues is contiguous with her working-class roots, and in which familial, communal, and sexual love coalesce into unforgettable portraits of democratic life on the brink of revelation. You'll find no stick-figure pieties or fool's gold politics here. Everything th
Tom Sleigh, author of The King's Touch
"In her eighth brilliant collection, Beatty once again proves herself a skilled master poet who sings of loss, grief, and trauma--but she also whispers a refrain of dynamic resolve: 'Now I'm a heart without a head, walking. / I don't need to be right-- / I just need it to be worth it . . .'"
