Aqueous Red
Aqueous Red explores the deep shadows of love. In Kit Ingram’s spellbinding poetic exorcism of violence, intimacy, and dreams, illicit liaisons surface in fragments of interconnected lives. A boy watches his father pour scalding water onto his brother’s hands, and later rescues a doll, promising to protect it with a kiss. A priest blesses a prostitute with holy water while a son drowns in a painful memory. In the sequence ‘Red’, a married man falls in love with a drag queen, and they play out fantasies of violence in a theatrical blaze that threatens their destruction. Intimate and voyeuristic, this collection plumbs the unseen moments that bind us all.
What readers are saying ...
‘Kit is a master at chiselled versification, at crafting powerful yet aesthetically restrained images. There’s an alluring delicacy of touch behind the savagery that often takes place in these poems. Concealed behind the emotional distance the poet puts between himself and his subjects, there’s a steady, ticking heart. And guess what: it’s red! —Alberto Fernandez-Carbajal, PhD