Showgirls: The Movie in Sestinas

“How can we know the dancer from the dance?” W. B. Yeats famously asks in “Among School Children.” Jeffery Conway’s cornucopia of poetic DVD commentary encircles that unanswerable question. Calling to the stage the gold-glittered divas of Showgirls, Conway uses the sestina’s circular dance to celebrate each frame of cinema’s campiest of stripper films. —Daniel Nester It has been far too long since a collection of poems summoned us to a world of performers and voyeurs, catfights and choreography, lip gloss and lap dances. In fact, this has never been done before, and Jeffery Conway’s Showgirls: The Movie in Sestinas digs deeper than any collection in recent memory. Conway proves that the sestina form is more than a card trick, but rather a mechanism for uncovering hidden commentaries on the human condition, its soundtrack unfurling layers of film direction, cultural criticism, and pure emotion. Drop your inhibitions at the doorway of this book, and let it rock you. —Mary Biddinger