The Tribal Rage Elegy - local police woman’s poetry anthology brutalizes the contemporary

 

Poet Sunisa Minoptra at a recent book signing event
Photo by Persephone Bolero-Trenton

By Persephone Bolero-Trenton

Charles Bukowski once said something to the effect of “careful people and careful poetry live just long enough to die safely.” 

In the tradition of Bukowski’s gritty, underground style, and Chuck Palahniuk’s minimalistic narrative approach, Sunisa Minoptra — local policewoman, hopeless romantic, bar owner, and Xoco tribe member — burst onto the Amazon literary scene with a debut poetry anthology “Slippery Swears.” Her compilation is nothing short of an exercise in post-modern angst and paradoxical soliloquy. 

With reckless disregard for poetic conventions, Minoptra declares war on alliteration and anaphora and spits out something as untamed as the very jungle itself. Having sold several copies at Friday’s Xoco dance party, Minoptra’s work is the best selling poetry anthology in the Amazon for the month of December. 

 

Minoptra illustrated and designed the book herself.

 

Minoptra’s anthology opens up with “The Slippery Floor,” a brutally frank antithesis to the typical apologia monologues so common when poets write of their day jobs. “The Slippery Floor” uses blunt exposition to share an apoplectic police officer’s commitment to duty and the search for truth in the midst of a complete disregard for the civil rights of the accused.

“‘Police Brutality’ is the scream as they cause such a scene,
But the charming young Officer could never be mean.
‘You hit me again!’ perps would lie and roar,
‘It wasn’t me’ smiles the officer ‘it was the slippery floor.’”

The police officer turned poet abandons any notion of rhythm and pace to produce an enticing, yet disturbingly harsh reality. Perhaps the best way to describe Minoptra’s style is to borrow her approach to prose and say that she skull fucks iambic pentameter shits on caesura. 

In “Snow White and the seven Xoco,” Minoptra takes a traditional parable of innocence and sincerity rising above envy, and turns the entire trope on its head, leaving it bloody and deformed.

“Licking their lips, they crowded round her en masse,
Khaing made her dance, while the rest spanked her ass.
Snow White spent her time, slaving as a Nova,
Until one day came her Prince: she thought it was over!”

The narration proceeds to de-damsel the protagonist. In a metaphor for the frustrating struggle against patriarchal dominance, while embracing the liberation of feminine sexuality, Minoptra’s limerick enjambment twist comes with the castration of the Snow’s would-be savior. 

Minoptra told the Amazon River Sun that she has been writing poetry since she was a young girl. She said she gathers her inspiration from her daily experience as a member of law enforcement in a lawless jungle, where community and tribe replace civilized structure and order.

“All the beautiful, wonderful people of the Amazon inspire me,” she said. But as she does with her poetry, she brutalized the cliche in the next breath, adding, “also beating them.” 

Copies of Minoptra’s “Slippery Swears” can be obtained at the Xoco camp or where ever you find the author.