A Feast of Small Proportions by Rivka Clifton

A Feast of Small Proportions is a chapbook that interrogates how the body and mind are navigated and reclaimed, embodying themes of capitalist critique, death, consumption, and queerness. Clifton writes, “I had two shadows: one with and one without fangs. / Both wiggled their dark tongues inside my skull.” With visceral use of the lyric, Clifton brings out these different permutations of shadow; what it means to occlude, be occluded, and to move within these modes. These poems are ones that find us in the dark parts of the ordinary, whether in a junk drawer, a yard, a dog leash, a faucet. These poems call us to redefine how we create.

PRAISE FOR
A Feast of Small Proportions

“A Feast of Small Proportions, Rivka Clifton's newest collection, is one that entices readers to sink their fangs into its flesh and never let go. In the captivating landscape of these poems, Rivka Clifton illuminates the beauty and violence that lurks in the darkness, in nightclubs pulsing with sweat and strobe lights, in cemeteries and funeral homes, in cities filled with night's ‘feral cries,’ and within the ruins of American capitalism. Rich with surreal, breathtaking imagery and surprising turns, Clifton wields her sharp poetic gaze with precision, nuance, and compassion, urging readers to resist apathy and distrust, and offering instead an irresistibly seductive invitation to embrace the unbridled animality within each of us."

— Ally Ang, author of Let the Moon Wobble

“Rivka Clifton’s A Feast of Small Proportions presses, deliciously, into my bright bruises and reminds me of the fact that I have a body. These are poems that tongue each tooth and find the cavities that reach down to the pulp. ‘The voice won’t come / if the tongue is wrong,’ and Clifton’s, here, is so very right.”

— Canese Jarboe, author of Sissy

“Courting both gloom and luminescence, the ectoplasmic particulates of A Feast of Small Proportions reveal the trace evidence of a life lived, a life lost, and a life one receives after a mother’s passing: ‘After death, there is always / another box to look into.’ Vivisecting moments of the titular small proportions, Rivka Clifton is mortician, necromancer, and engineer in turns, embalming memory with surgical precision, resurrecting with careful magic the dead and the gone, and rewiring the mechanical circuity of ordinary moments. These poems dissect pathos at a careful remove, with the deft precision of a gothic Brigit Pegeen Kelly: ‘That evening, I felt so dead / I had two shadows: one with and one without fangs.’ This feast feeds on and initiates you into the vampiric, into living dead. In that initiation, Clifton reveals, for the mourners, the waylaid, the phantoms, that the dark might be a refuge. She is a poet of molecular witness, pulling back the veil to reveal the truth: we spend our entire lives in invisible coffins.”

— Temperance Aghamohammadi, author of Battalion Shaped Girl