Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince edited by Dianne Borsenik NightBallet Press, 2016

Imagine a murder-mystery. No. Stop. Imagine 2002 CSI: Miami. No. Wait. Just the yell from the opening credits continuing, constantly, throughout. Wait, no. It's not a yell. Imagine walking in to your apartment earlier than you had told your roommate to expect you and the lights are all off and you can hear a yell. Well. Yes. A yell. And so you have a minute decision to make: do you make some noise, turn on the lights to alert the yeller, or do you do everything in your power to stay a ghost so as to not disturb? And so you do your most respectful move and sit down on your couch in the dark living room to scroll on your phone making absolutely no sound because you know your bedroom door creaks, and you know there's a particular spot in the hallway that, also, creaks, and that you cannot get around and so any further movement into the house, closer to the yelling, would risk alerting the yeller. And it does not last unbearably long. It never does. But while you are considering the lastingness of the music you wonder all potential terrors that might occur: what if your roommate immediately comes out of the bedroom? what if they're naked? what if your bowels begin to betray you? And none of those questions come to play. And all those questions come to play. Shit, you note, forgot to take off the mesh top and the nipple piercing. It doesn't take much to sell Prince. He's thrilling, direct, and provocative — daring to extract the rawness of your feelings when you didn't want to have them extracted, only to inevitably make you dance with them. Delirious: A Poetic Celebration of Prince (NightBallet Press, 2016) walks you through the journey of one's coming into Prince, what they came out of, and what kind of commery is inherited. These are poems keeping in mind the tender and awkward songs that sex, desire, vitality and melancholy often leave us singing without any hope that we are, in fact, the owners of the songs. The greatest commonalities between the works are how they strive to take account of how Prince enabled the poem, poet, people to resist the awful definitions that they'd been longing to resist. And I mean there's always — as written in Reuben Jackson's "Elegy" — "days / when you must create odes / to a magnificent booty." Step. Stick. Turn. Feast. Thunder. Sing. Gyrate. Long. Push. Wrap. Hold. Grab. Need. Knead. Need. Love. Fear. Free. Twist. Delight. Damn. Yell. Scream. Scream. Scream. Then read these poems. Visit NightBallet Press' Website

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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