Cow Stomach and Mother Fat
In his second full-length poetry collection Cow Stomach and Mother Fat, Steve Halle interrogates how our innermost selves emerge from time immemorial to navigate conditional economies of being. Written and refined over a fourteen-year span, Cow Stomach and Mother Fat employs the dramatis personae of Cow Stomach, Mother Fat, and Ensu Fario, whose monologues and verses use dark comedy to explore ideas of hunger, needfulness, want, desire, and love; emergence and formation of being and identity; how human and nonhuman persons are intertwined and enmeshed in precarious systems; toxicity/toxic masculinity; monstrousness; formlessness; and the politicization and regulation of gender, among other subjects. Halle’s poetry blends aggressive incantatory prose poem streams with softer lyrical flights and stylized design elements to create a sui generis work that reckons with the seemingly sacred forces that may be misused to commodify our most intimate interrelationships.
PRAISE FOR COW STOMACH AND MOTHER FAT
With reluctant gusto, a quiver of yum-yum and bounteous ick, Steve Halle renders a meat-masque for the gristled, beefy prisons we’ve made of our dumb hearts. Spasming between the starheight of galactopoesis and the gut-plug of pink slime, recalling “The House of Asterion”and The Cow by Ariana Reines, here comes empathy, dismay, moral outrage, self-incrimination, fantasy, disgust, and all the poisons that flesh is heir and air is also heir to. Hail Halle, dim downer, then liedown: infinite dot cow.
—Joyelle McSweeney
In the era of the polycrisis—when our species knows we’re courting extinction but can’t be convinced to course correct—one of the only sane things you can do is arrive at a book like Cow Stomach and Mother Fat . “i hate to feel,” it reflects back in our faces. It’s a slaughterhouse, an operating theatre, a warzone of traumas competing for attention. There is no peace here, just a weird and disturbing tension; an acknowledgment of all the shameful secrets we’d rather die than face. It becomes blurred, the line between consumer and consumed. And it gets clarified—that to be in relationship with our world in the way we are is to cannibalize ourselves, to eat our children’s futures. “i turn meat over meat i touch my thumb meat as if it were steak meat.” “Who would do this … who could do this … who did this?” Halle asks. And the question isn’t rhetorical.
—Nick Demske
“What percentage of cow stomach is used in making things?” A galactopoetic verbo-churn of beast fats and fat sacs, Steve Halle’s Cow Stomach and Mother Fat is an orally (and aurally) haunting exploration of gender, consumption, and alienation. As if injected with Aase Berg’s cosmic fat and Christine Wertheim’s abject sonics, these creaturely poems confront a mirror-hungry society quick to feed and grill. On the hunt for the “beast you seek,” Halle leads readers to the spilled milk of language itself, a “run-on alchemy” offering endless secretions from an overfed syllabary. In other words: the cream of the crop. Cow Stomach and Mother Fat is the unforgettable event of a body weighing in on humankind’s slow fade to black: “the lonesome corner where the cooking took place.”
—Paul Cunningham, author of Brillo
Steve Halle occupies a unique position in contemporary American poetry as both a practitioner and a vital cultural architect. In Cow Stomach and Mother Fat, he brings those powers together to create a visual book with mouthfeel, a book of dense cow-y persona rich with viscerality. His prose is so crisp as his tender homage-manifesto to the cow stuck in capitalist cogs.
—Carmen Giménez
ABOUT THE POET
Steve Halle lives, writes, teaches, and publishes books in Normal, IL where he is the director of the Publications Unit at Illinois State University. He is the author of Cow Stomach and Mother Fat, Map of the Hydrogen World, cessation covers, and The Collectors, and his writing has been published in various literary magazines. He is the founder and publisher of the award-winning nonprofit literary publisher co•im•press, the editor-in-chief of the poetry magazine SRPR, and the founder and publisher for Downstate Legacies, Undiscovered Americas, and the teaching chapbook press and workshop PRESS 254.
