All the Gold Hurts My Mouth

Katherine Leyton

• Publisher: icehouse poetry
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780864928467
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Canadian Poetry
• Index: Literature

Winner, 2017 ReLit Award

Katherine Leyton's fresh and vibrant debut collection takes on the sexual politics of the twenty-first century, boldly holding up a mirror to the male gaze and interrogating the nature of images and illusions.

Confronting the forces of mass communication — whether television, movies, or the Internet — Leyton explores the subtle effects of the media on our perceptions and interactions, including the pain of alienation and the threat of violence simmering just below the surface.

And yet, for all its unflinching and raw lyricism, the poetry of All the Gold Hurts My Mouth is warm and searching, full of humour and hope. Engaging her readers with lush vocabulary and spare, tightly controlled forms, Leyton's poems become a rich quest for identity, authenticity, and nature uncorrupted. Reaching gloriously from isolation and pain to connection with love, Leyton channels the wit of feminists past to create a manifesto for our time, an affirmation of what might be possible.

RICHARD GERE’S GRAND PIANO

Here. This is it:

you’re a waitress.

You bring people French toast

and bacon. You can’t pay the Hydro bill.

I used to think of you as somebody

grand, like one of those pianos Edward

fucked Vivian on in Pretty Woman.

Maybe you are.

Maybe your greatest talent

is gleaming in empty foyers.

I AM RIDING TOWARD AN APOCALYPSE — I THINK IT’S MINE.

Watch me on my bike.

On Facebook.

On Instagram.

Watch the sun beat through a lawn tree.

I want to go to sleep there and burn

until it is quiet through me like woods,

but even the woods are in perfect rows,

planted by a man in boots,

his back trembling.

I saw him in a documentary.

I call these thoughts death,

but my death is no longer original;

I saw it in a documentary.

You already said that.

ADVERTISEMENTS

TV shows imagine God is listening.

They signal this with synthesized violins.

My idea of the idea of God

is a good ol’ boy

in a cardigan, His hands

resting snugly in pockets,

winking at the television,

asking me what I’m selling.

I’m not so sure. We watch a girl

at The Gap fold a sweater. I cup a breast,

measure my waist, and ask God

if my sanity is that sweater, collapsed

in a box with a ribbon around it.

Ahhh, He gasps, the girls in their Revlon!

and starts to boogie to the jingle

like a new man.

SEARCH

Type in girls

and Google pulls up its skirt:

thumbnail upon thumbnail of cunt

dildo in wet cunt

cellphone in wet cunt

zucchini in wet cunt

Colin Farrell in wet cunt

some kind of mythical creature in wet cunt

big cunt

bare cunt

French cunt

German cunt

vintage cunt

cunt new and improved

cunt like you’ve never seen before

cunt on the beach

cunt in the forest

cunt on the rocky ...

Table of contents

• Richard Gere’s Grand Piano
• Notes
• Acknowledgements