CJ Farnsworth

 If You Keep Making that Shameface. . .

By CJ Farnsworth

ISBN: 978-1-962405-41-6          $17.00

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

CJ Farnsworth (she/her) is a poet residing in WV. She has a BA from Bethany College, an MS from Franciscan University, and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poems have appeared in I-70 Review, Backbone Mountain Review, Appalachian Review, Kenning, Kestrel, Rattle, Women Speak, IMPOST, and others. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.

ABOUT THE  BOOK:

The poems in If You Keep Making that Shameface. . . explore how shame shapes women. These poems, by a WV poet, travel the backroads of female identity to unearth the social, cultural, geographic, and personal landscapes where women lose themselves. With brash, heartache, and hunger, this debut collection unearths a time capsule that lays bare the tangled roots and deep rot shame breeds, while discovering some of the vulnerability, savvy, and resilience needed to reclaim the self by dropping the weight of shame.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

The poems in CJ Farnsworth’s much anticipated first collection If You Keep Making that Shameface. . .  are full of grit and sass, and she warns us: “When a woman finds. . . A frame to stretch me, feathers, wells of ink, a palette / ribbon for my hair. . . do not mistake me for playing paper dolls.” Farnsworth has a keen sense of observation, an inherent instinct for pivot and cliffhanger, and a precise understanding of distinct character building and the power of word choice. She writes of bingo, blood-letting, brine tang, bad love, bawdy sex, and barbarous politics. Under her careful tutelage, “every blink / and wink creeps up like honey/suckle on the cerebral chainlink.”

Kari Gunter-Seymour, author of Alone in the House of My Heart, Ohio Poet Laureate

American poets, it is said, follow Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman. Like Whitman, CJ Farnsworth’s poems contain multitudes. “I’ve never been anywhere but inside myself,” she notes in one of these complex and formally various poems that are, by turns, wise, funny, sardonic, tender, and wry. Although “writing a poem in West Virginia is worse than going to hell in bare feet,” Farnsworth does more than survive. “If it’s alive, it means,” she says, making every word live large in this fine new book.

Natasha Saje, author of The Future Will Call You Something Else