Ninth Iota

Irene Koronas’s Ninth Iota explains why humans want to craft something like civilization. It’s not just that the uncivil can be fearsome — it’s that they make many recoil. If you’ve already smashed those rose-colored glasses, the better to see, these poems won’t repel and may even amuse you. But those still lingering (and preferring to linger) in the dimness of the cave may look at these poems with suspicion — that wouldn’t be the poet’s fault. Koronas did her job in order to write these poems: she studied and analyzed human history, including, naturally, its myths. The result offers unique insights with erotic charge as a bonus.

— Eileen R. Tabios

Irene Koronas’s poems carefully splinter and refute our expectations in visceral minimalist fragments of desire, perversion, myth and magic. The carefully cleaved phrases accrue into strange moments of fascination, startling us with their re-imaginings and verbal dissections. Double axe facts and a high image rate mimic and re-invent our inner worlds and dreams. This is language to chew and digest, poetry to ponder and provoke; the language of then and now and tomorrow. Let this artist/writer be your embroid tutor while there is still time to learn.

— Rupert M. Loydell

With a surprising number of unknown and obscure words, Irene Koronas’s ‘hurls chalky men / into the underworld // of mother repeats’ and, in poem after poem, creates an erotically charged, posthuman version of ancient Greece. Her language undercuts desire for the mimetic.

— Nathan Spoon