Introducing Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene

Carolyne Wright, whose translations appear in issues 6 and 10 of The Los Angeles Review, has just released her latest collection of poems, Mania Klepto: The Book of Eulene.

This new collection of poems centers around Wright’s wild, free-spirited, and unforgettable alter-ego, Eulene. Don Bogan, editor of The Cincinnati Review, says, “Of all the descendants of Berryman’s Henry Pussy-cat, Carolyne Wright’s Eulene has got to be the most, to use the poet’s own term, bodacious. This ‘gregarious loner’ weaves her formidable presence from Puyallup to Calcutta, from childhood memories to apocalyptic myth. Narrative, satire, and lyric meditation come together in an intricate, vivid portrait. In Mania Klepto, Eulene demands her say—and she says a lot.”

“Postmortem: Eulene,” reprinted below by permission of the author, gives a glimpse into Wright’s musical language, her uninhibited vision, and her unforgettable protagonist.

Postmortem : Eulene

Occluded stars bully me
like ghosts among twilit half domes.
They mock my tongue
with honey and silver, bloodhued
moons and tree sloths
that unwrap their slow shovels

and plummet past the lustre palms
in a mottled swoon. Their tails
never did curl properly. So
what about the blood count
of the stars, the night’s relentless weather?

Cancún couldn’t let on about its revelers
under such yield signs, hedged about
with corduroy and sticky milk.
The scatter-bird snaps the quetzal’s
neck and panthers grind their incisors.
Only names whose conjure fires

ash out a superhuman scorn
jump ship and disappear into the port’s
labyrinth of alleys. New lovers move
to safe houses after curfew
and emerge next season

with land-legged suits, new pin codes
in their documents, new histories—
they’ve always been here.
Charismatic black sheep, the baby
in the brain cries Baby, its mother
opens her blouse in the Swiss-cheese

riddle of hymnals. Jezebel is the name tag
on the morgue’s latest arrival. So
why don’t I turn my face, rueful
blue but featureless, toward
the self-effacing cradle?

Learn more at Turning Point Books.