Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes

Nicky Beer

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Winner:Lambda Literary Award -Bisexual Poetry (2023)

What is illusion-a deception, or a revelation? What is a poem--the truth, or "a diverting flash, / a mirror showing everything / but itself"?

Nicky Beer's latest collection of poems is a labyrinthine academy specializing in the study of subterfuge; Marlene Dietrich, Dolly Parton, and Batman are its instructors. With an energetic eye, she thumbs through our collective history books--and her personal one, too--in an effort to chart the line between playful forms of duplicity and those that are far more insidious.

Through delicious japery, poems that can be read multiple ways, and allusions ranging from Puccini's operas to Law & Order, Beer troubles the notion of truth. Often, we settle for whatever brand of honesty is convenient for us, or whatever is least likely to spark confrontation--but this, Beer knows, is how we invite others to weigh in on what kind of person we are. This is how we trick ourselves into believing they're right. "Listen / to how quiet it is when I lose the self-doubt played / for so long I mistook it for music."

Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes asks us to look through the stereoscope: which image is the real one? This one--or this one, just here? With wisdom, humility, and a forthright tenderness, Nicky Beer suggests that we consider both--together, they might contribute to something like truth.

Book Details

Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Publish Date: Mar 8th, 2022
Pages: 104
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.40in - 5.40in - 0.40in - 0.30lb
EAN: 9781571315397
Categories: • Women Authors• American - General• LGBTQ+

About the Author

Beer, Nicky: - "Nicky Beer is the author of Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. She is a bi/queer writer, and the author of two other collections of poems, The Octopus Game and The Diminishing House, both winners of the Colorado Book Award. Her awards include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, a MacDowell Fellowship, a fellowship and a scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, a Mary Wood Fellowship from Washington College, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and a Campbell Corner Prize. Her poems have been published in Best American Poetry, Poetry, The Nation, the New Yorker, the Southern Review, the Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. She is an associate professor at the University of Colorado - Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel.

Praise for this book

Praise for Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes

"Beer populates the book's pages with a cavalcade of pleasantly deceptive voices . . . But Beer's playful embrace of such strange subject matter conceals darkly complicated speakers whose ultimate deceptions fool only themselves . . . Clever, kaleidoscopic, and powerfully profound."--Booklist, Starred Review

"From magic shows to drag shows, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes applies a queer sensibility to some of life's strange mysteries and pop-culture icons with simultaneous wackiness and intellect."--Shondaland

"Electric . . . Readers are asked to look past first impressions in this imaginative and spirited collection."--Publishers Weekly

"A mix of delightful humor and deep, delicate sadness. Real Phonies is critical of the facades we choose to believe in, sure, but underneath it all is Beer's genuine love of performance and the transformative, healing power of suspending disbelief in the right moments."--Lavender Magazine

"To read Nicky Beer's third collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes, is to experience poetry as pageantry. In Beer's hands, the poetic form is a staging place for spectacle, replete with provocative imagery and a brash cast of characters . . . Her formal shape-shifting and penchant for performance make this a magnetic collection."--BookPage, Starred Review

"The cheeky poem titles and subjects she chooses to inspect within clue you in to the fact that this is performance, with Beer controlling the show . . . Veering between full-on jokester, esoteric performance artist, and masterful dramatic actor delivering a gut-wrenching monologue, she lands somewhere in the middle, a generous magician who lets us see the mechanics of the tricks and of herself."--Southwest Contemporary

"'The sky is one long drink, ' Nicky Beer writes in this much-anticipated third collection, serving as a most welcome resource for people who seek imaginative illumination--and who could use a good old-fashioned chuckle. This book shimmers with Beer's trademark wit and wildly inventive takes on pop culture, history, and humankind. Listen for the thump in these pages--this book has a bonafide heartbeat."--Aimee Nezhukumatathil

"A brilliant, rollicking collection, Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes illuminates the strange wonders and abiding mysteries that surround us. Beer is an exceptional writer, capable of mingling intellectual depth with humor and sharp poignancy. A wonderful book."--Jasmin Darznik

"'Beauty should always taste a bit of its own blood / and blame in its teeth, ' Nicky Beer writes in her triumphant Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes. Here is a collection of poems so funny they'll break your heart and make you glad for it. Take these lines that comprise 'Sawing a Lady in Half' 'they want it to be true / and don't want it to be true / that they want it to be true.' Or take the witty wordplay on the Dark Knight's name in 'Dear Bruce Wayne, ' in which Beer imparts this wisdom: 'The bruise / wanes. Every woman / is Batman.' Nicky Beer is the superhero we need, and these poems are the invisible jet she has sent to save us. Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is by turns lyrically burnished, subversively funny, and astonishingly beautiful. Beer says it best when she writes 'what's needed / now is a tongue with the chill of steel.' Dear reader, look no further."--James Allen Hall

"Nicky Beer's Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes is a bonafide triumph--beginning with the table of contents. Just a few of her knockout titles: "Drag Day at Dollywood," "Still Life with Pork Livers Rolled Like Handkerchiefs," Dear Bruce Wayne," "Two-Headed Taxidermied Calf." Unless you're a pig or a cow, how could you not read on?

Beer's intoxication with language combines with drop-dead wackiness and wisdom, and she uses fabrications to get at the truth: how disconnects connect us, how distortions, in concert, undo illusion. Via magicians, impersonators, forgers, plagiarists, liars, screen stars and two-bit actors, Beer delivers dark truths with humor and surprise. The poem "Elegy" begins: "I never liked the dead boy." It's a statement that feels less like confession than blunt instrument. Throughout the collection, the poems do a cannonball through the appropriate or expected into deeper waters.

In "The Poet Who Does Not Believe in Ghosts," Beer writes: "she believes death is God's/apology for suffering." And in "Drag Day at Dollywood," she gives us a zany fun house of Dollys that morphs into a tender and sad eternity (or illusion thereof) in which: "Dolly, exhausted and sunburned, collapses/onto a bench, rests her head on Dolly's breast, /who rests her head on Dolly's breast, who rests/her head on Dolly's breast on Dolly's breast."

If that isn't mother's milk, what is?" --Andrea Cohen

"Reading Real Phonies and Genuine Fakes felt like a dream. Each of Nicky Beer's poems is blurred around the edges, swirling with hairspray, Marlene Dietrich, and magic tricks. The collection is funny yet emotional, blunt yet reverent, and illuminating. Each poem wraps readers in a soft blanket, but also fits them for a teased wig and sits them down in Dollywood. The story told is one of queerness, which is: a John Hughes movie, Batman, David Bowie, penicillin, and a stereoscope. Beer's work reads like a love letter, asking readers to embrace queerness in all its glam and tackiness." --Nikita Imafidon, Raven Book Store

Praise for The Octopus Game

"I can't help but 'succumb to the enamored, oceanic maw' of these poems. I love their horror and humility, their playfulness. Implicating me in the mysterious beauty of the universe, Beer connects the reader to the octopus, connects the octopus to the reader, and connects us all to her poems' surprising subjects. Drawing insights from least predictable places, these poems are 'a lesson in how ardor ignites not in unlikeness, but unlikelihood.'"-- Camille Dungy

"Clever and arresting . . . [Beer's] energy for collecting trivia can equal the verve of her syntax: a group of eight danseurs photographed a century ago are a 'pubescent octet in sepia wash, symmetrically poised / in borrowed frocks'; in the eponymous game, '[t]wo people sit side by side / And become each other's arms.' Beer's insistence on using octopuses (and squid and cuttlefish) as metaphors does not keep her from exploring--and, at times, flaunting--marine zoology, such as when she writes, '[T]he thousands of real / octopus corpses washed / upon' a Portuguese beach years ago. Nor does her attention to the links between human and nonhuman life, to the way that we are all just collections of cells, prevent her from delighting in old forms, especially sonnets and pantoums."-- Publishers Weekly
"Beer takes the octopus as a central conceit in her second collection, which unfolds like a phantasmagoric bestiary. With the eye of a wild documentarian, Beer imagines fantastic names for the strange cephalopods ('viral naiad, ' 'charred nebula, ' and 'sepia epicene'), and catalogs their otherworldly traits. . . . Beer links humans and invertebrates amid the unfathomable mass of twentieth-century data--the 'maddening swarm of alien ciphers'--and reminds readers of a festering, dark desire: 'We cannot bear to have our depths unmonstered.'"-- Booklist

Praise for The Diminishing House

"A wonder of both human understanding and poetic craft."-- Pleiades

"These are more than simply poems of intense intelligence and complexity; every line contains intricate movements, always progressing, redefining, and delighting in language and sound. . . . These are intricate contraptions, delicate and beautiful shapes."-- Hollins Critic

"Written with education and enlightenment, The Diminishing House is a cherishable collection."-- Midwest Book Review