Sunset Grand Couturier, poems by Myra Malkin

Publication Date: February 15, 2022

Paperback, 100 pages

ISBN: 978-1-956782-01-1

$24.00 retail, $18.50 from publisher

The closing poem in Myra Malkin’s collection Sunset Grand Couturier plays with the tale that Sir Walter Raleigh’s widow kept his embalmed head as a literal memento mori, and this is a perfect coda for a work dealing with death, loss, and memory in startling, and often startlingly engaging, fashion. To say that many of her poems are inspired by wide array of authors, artists, historical figures, and intellectuals (including her title, taken from Pound’s Cantos) is true and evidence of her deep immersion in culture, but these are merely points of departure for her own very original poetic excursions. Penetrating but never ponderous, serious but never self-serious, these are poems of sensitivity, intellectual heft and aesthetic wonder.

Praise for Myra Malkin & Sunset Grand Couturier

Myra Malkin’s Sunset Grand Couturier addresses aging and dying with intelligence and wit. I know — How can these topics be fun? But these poems are, and the sly self-deprecations of her “unremodeled self,” this “addict of containers,” who clutches all her notebooks, her “darlings,” to her chest as she's drowning, whose “roommate body” complains of being colonized, reveal an impressive display of sometimes-ekphrastic proficiency of craft. O the images and sounds of Malkin's poems! You’ll reach for the “fizgig’s transfixed flare,” the “pataflafla-gabble.” You’ll wonder about the hedgehog chandelier. And you won’t want to wear the “dump-glitter” of a wealthy woman’s jewelry, though you’ll think about that jewelry long after. The poetry in Sunset Grand Couturier forces us to acknowledge the Grand Couturier of metaphorical sunset, but there is nothing sentimental here. Her lines are fresh. Who else would inform us that her “widow-platter” is dishwasher safe, or that her amorous dead is becoming “a spirit / as perfect as bacon”? Yes, “the dead, / with their memory-switchblades, / go sit by the door,” but what Myra Malkin has with which to counter that is her words, and they hit the mark with force.

—Susana Case, author of Dead Shark on the N Train & The Damage Done

Sunset Grand Couturier—from the last line of Ezra Pound’s “Canto 80”—is a collection f poems inspired by Dickinson, Pollack, Melville, Einstein, Klee and many others—not their work, but what their work suggests; and what it suggests to Myra Malkin is a wild departure from anything the reader might expect. Each poem startles with soaring musical talent, lines both untethered and right on track. The starting point may be Japanese textbooks, a law dictionary, or Mary Magdalene; the end point of these undulating flights of imagination and searing discernment will be anchored with resounding truth. I normally quote passages in a jacket blurb. Sunset Grand Couturier defies my attempts to find the representative moment. It distracts with tender brilliance at every turn.

—Lynn McGee, author of Tracks, Sober Cooking, Heirloom Bulldog & more

Compress tears long enough and they turn to jewels. The emotion here recollected in tranquility is grief, the remembered lineaments of the poet’s husband, his rolled up chambray sleeves twined with literary allusions. In Part One, we move backwards through time to childhood and the learned suppression of feeling, life encased in a suffocating corset of politeness that can be escaped by wiggling through keyholes of wordplay, quotations, memory. In Part Three, we jump forward to aging, damp, baobabs and haboobs, and the poet’s death-to-come, yet Part Four finds her still holding fast to the satisfactions of chorizo and chocolate. Sooner or later, Malkin knows, her ship will go down, but she will meet her fate standing on deck, clutching her unzipped handbag and unwieldy notebooks full of other people's verses, staring around her terrified but still hungry for one last glimpse of Turner’s “insurrectionary light.” A breakthrough book.

—Meredith Tax, author of Rivington Street and Union Square, The Rising of the Women, & A Road Unforeseen: Women Fight the Islamic State.

A collection of exquisite poems—at once imagistic, observant, smart, dry-humored, with nods to the arts (literary, among them), and always navigable, the poems—varied in modes of telling from personal lyric to narrative to ekphrastic, and to persona—weaves together to allow the reader access to enchanting as well as uncomfortable subjective and objective worlds. This collection often reads as deeply personal (though who are we to assume that they reflect the actual life of a speaker?); they always read as keenly seen and felt. Malkin writes with masterful precision and authority whether from life itself or imagination.”

—Martha Rhodes, author of The Thin Wall

About the Author

Myra Malkin is the author of No Lifeguard on Duty (Mainstreet Rag Publishing Company, 2010). In 2016, in a contest judged by Edward Hirsch, her poem “Wallis-Wallace” won the 12th Mudfish Poetry Prize. After growing up in New York City, she studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, in London. She was a founding member of the New Repertory Company, an off-off Broadway group that performed in a former funeral parlor. She then attended Cornell Law School and, for fifteen years, was a legal services attorney in upstate New York. She now lives in Manhattan.