Originally comprised of 151, 3-line poems, Thomas Moore's stunning 2014 book "Skeleton Costumes" saw the writer's work stripped down to its most raw and effecting form yet. Now, after a sold out first run, "Skeleton Costumes" returns in a new, expanded edition which includes an additional 30 poems in the form of a haunting new section titled "No One Will Ever Find You". Skinned of any extraneous flesh, the simplicity of these pieces belie their emotional impact and visceral depth. These short stabs and sharp explosions of verse accumulate to create an unconventional and, at times, harrowing narrative that investigates fear, lust and an abandonment of moral codes.
RELEASE DATE: Wednesday November 11th, 2015
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Skeleton Costumes review by Diamuid Hester,
Full Stop magazine (read the whole review here)
In his latest poetry collection, Skeleton Costumes, Thomas Moore takes the hideously beautiful and stretches it out into a pockmarked skin that enfolds his reflections on death, loneliness, fear, and alienation. Like his lapidary 2011 novella, Graves, this new work is mostly populated by desperate youths who find themselves violently exploited by predatory adults or who are determined to end their own lives in grisly and courageous ways. Skeleton Costumes is slighter and much more intense than the earlier work, however, comprising 151 evocative haikus — tiny, delicate, and evanescent as eyelashes that appear unannounced on bright white pages.
The scene, for many of us, of fumbling immature experimentation with poetic form, in Moore’s work the humble haiku passes before a glass darkly and sees itself transformed into something altogether more macabre, scarred by violent excesses. Its constraints (17 syllables in 3 lines: 5, 7, 5 syllables respectively), which were once part of a childish game now appear to bind and abrade the extremities of feeling. Poetry is no longer the means by which emotion may be distilled and expressed; instead it’s like Moore’s little poems resist and restrain the impassioned, featureless subjects that are forced through them. Like his friend, Dennis Cooper, whose famous George Miles cycle of novels pits its awkward adolescents against elaborate immovable structures, Moore uses form to intimate the presence of a diffuse and manipulating menace. Of course it’s the poet himself who’s behind the curtain but, like Cooper, Moore plainly empathises with his subjects and, bit by bit, he has the reader empathise with them too.
Each poem glimpses a scene or an emotional state, a threat or promise, exquisitely rendered and, more often than not, presented apropos of nothing. If you took a list poem by a second-generation New York School writer like Joe Brainard or Tim Dlugos and replaced nostalgia with loneliness and the whimsical with the deathly serious, you might get Skeleton Costumes. On facing pages Moore has arranged the following:
When you are upset
My whole world shakes to the core
Please believe in me
Teenage Satanists
Burning with holy tempers
The sky opens up
But this is not to say that the collection doesn’t at times offer teasing, tantalising indications of the existence of an underlying narrative: like John Ashbery’s work it derives much of its propulsion from intimating that these accounts are pieces of a puzzle whose instructions have been misplaced. “Join all of the dots” one haiku runs; “And tell me what you can see / Is it terrible?” The following series of five haiku suggests complicity between two characters – perpetrator and victim – and a shared act of sexualised violence that may loosely join the sequence together.
I don’t say a thing
I’m scared of what you will do
Where do we go now?
Close your eyes for me
This is going to hurt you
I hate myself more
Pour boiling water
All over his tiny balls
And don’t tell a soul
Cum and piss in me
Smash my skull with a hammer
I’m ordinary
You’re just hanging there
You’re not saying anything
This is where it ends
Two features of these poems I think indicate Moore’s debt to Arthur Rimbaud, that ubiquitous bad boy of French Symbolism. First, Moore’s haikus recall Rimbaud’s tendency in the Illuminations to present his reader with perfectly illumined flashes of poetic consciousness without any over-arching through-line. Updating the French poet’s technique, Skeleton Costumes sometimes reads as if Rimbaud were on Whatsapp: questions are answered out of sequence; messages fail to deliver; data drops out and excruciating lacunae open up in the conversation: Come back, come back, dear friend, only friend, come back. *sad emoticon* promise to be good *happy/winking emoticon*.
But it’s Moore’s astounding capacity for empathy that I think makes him a true son of Rimbaud — an incredibly empathetic writer who’s constantly casting himself out of his own anguished isolation and into the experience of others. As he says in the famous so-called “Seer” letter je est un autre (“I is an other”) and Rimbaud’s Is are always others’: provisional poetic identifications with various individuals.
The work opens with the following haiku, which sets the tone for the collection as a whole:
This Black Metal song
Nobody has really died
But we all feel gone
These opening lines gesture towards Moore’s interest in using the contrivances of art to conjure a shared feeling. Like the black metal song that sings of death in the cold wastes of Scandinavia, in Moore’s more macabre poems death is represented in sticky, mutilated detail, but you can’t say that anyone actually expires; nonetheless Moore creates a space in which the reader may experience the closeness of death, understand the poet’s subjects, and perhaps even begin to identify with them.
This idea of an empathetic identification is one that repeatedly appears throughout the collection: the title itself announces Moore’s intention to pull on the identity of another and inhabit — if briefly, for the space of seventeen syllables — their very bones. In Skeleton Costumes the poet is variously an alienated lover, an infatuated lover, a cuckold, a compliant victim of sexual assault, a non-compliant victim, a predator, a john . . .
I stole your iPhone
Because I knew you had lied
Don’t let this happen
You cum on my gut
I never want you to leave
Love me forever
Meal; awkward silence
I ask you if you fucked him
You look down and grin
My ass is bleeding
I don’t need your approval
FUCK ME TILL WE DIE
That photo’s not me
I would recognise myself
Don’t do this to me
There’s a fear, building
I can tell you feel it
So please, don’t pretend
what r u in 2?
do u have any limits?
can accommodate?
Read the entire review here at FULL STOP.
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PICKING AT THE BONES
By Thomas Moore
Skeleton Costumes started somewhere else. I’ve been working on my second novel for a little while now. I’ve gone through a lot of revisions and different experiments on the way to finding the voice that’s currently running the show and moving the book along. It’s taken quite a bit of work to tune into the moods and style that I’d been trying to get to. In order to get the novel to move how it needs to, certain elements that I loved had to be snipped away in order for other pieces that had emerged along the way.
There were certain scenes and threads that, for whatever reason, just weren’t working. Or rather they weren’t working alongside the rest of the book. I couldn’t arrange and fit them into any sort of structure that felt right. Some of them had been floating round my brain for a long time – some of them had been there for longer than I’d been working on the novel. There were images and moods that I’d gotten a little obsessed with – one in particular that kept flashing back and reintroducing itself. It (and others) wanted in, but they were either too rowdy or fucked up for their own good to get along with the rest of that structures that had established themselves as what was best for the novel to work.
In between working on the novel (which I’m still in the process of), I decided to try and find out why the pieces I’d had to cut wouldn’t work, and to see, just for my own curiosity – as well as a writing exercise – if I could get them into some kind of new shape or form. I ended up trying a variety of experiments with one scene in particular. I stretched it out, restructured it, fiddled with it, chipped at it. Eventually I cut it and cut it some more until it was a tiny fragment of the chapter that I’d initially intended it to be. I hacked it down to a short piece of prose – still no good – I hacked it down to a poem – still not right but better. I hacked it down till it was a three line poem and finally whatever had been getting in the way of the piece doing exactly what I wanted it to do seemed to have disappeared. Stripped down to a minimum, it worked better.
When I was left with the three-line poem, I figured, purely for fun, I’d try it as a haiku, with the first line having five syllables, the second having seven syllables and the final line back to five syllables. I wasn’t sure whether I was happy or frustrated or just amused that after so long working with the idea I’d got it to work how I wanted, in the simplest form that I could try. So I decided to try a few more ideas that I’d been struggling with – try and get them into a similar form. I spent a morning messing around with themes that I’d cut from my novel – one particular thread that was to do with these characters and violence and sex and some more grizzly material. I ended up with about seven or eight haikus.
I was quite happy with the stuff that I’d come up with. And when I was emailing Michael Salerno about something, I decided to copy and paste the new poems into the message. After some encouragement from him I decided to keep working with the form and use the themes that I’d been struggling with and hang them over this new framework that I’d realised I could use. The intention was not to specific book of haikus or anything like that, but the three-line, five syllable, seven syllable, five syllable form had proved the best mode to go, so I went with that.
There’s a narrative that runs through Skeleton Costumes, but it’s one built more on moods and suggestions as opposed to something that I feel the need to map out for anyone. It came from somewhere else and ended up in the minimalist, fragmented piles that were left at the end of the massacre.
- Thomas Moore, July 2014
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NO ONE WILL EVER FIND YOU
As well as new, alternative artwork, the expanded edition of Skeleton Costumes features a new section entitled NO ONE WILL EVER FIND YOU. Comprised of 30 pages of new material, it builds a new connected narrative, continuing where Skeleton Costumes left off.
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About the author:
Thomas Moore’s work has appeared in various publications in the UK, USA, France and Sweden and he is a regular contributor to The Fanzine. His first novel, 'A Certain Kind of Light', was published by Rebel Satori Press. His novella, 'GRAVES' and two poetry collections, 'The Night Is An Empire' and 'Skeleton Costumes', have been published by Kiddiepunk. He lives in the UK.
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BUY SKELETON COSTUMES: http://kiddiepunk.com/skeleton_costumes.htm
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Further links:
Kiddiepunk: www.kiddiepunk.com
Skeleton Costumes at Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/27421844-skeleton-costumes
Thomas Moore on Instagram: http://instagram.com/thomasmoronic
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p.s. Hey. Today is a lucky occasion in that the blog gets to welcome into the world the new, expanded edition of Thomas 'Moronic' Moore's already classic and, until two mere days ago, seemingly hopelessly o.o.p. 'Skeleton Costumes'. My paws are already firmly around this new edition, and I can assure you that, even if you are the lucky owner of the original book, you'll want this even more exquisite and now-definitive one. Have an insider look today, celebrate in your own inimitable ways, and, barring some sort of financial disaster, score it, yes? Thanks, folks, and thank you ever so much, TM, for putting this welcome wagon together. Otherwise, as I mentioned pre-Geneva, tomorrow I have get up insanely early in the morning and stumble out my front door in order to be in a film, so there won't be a p.s., but there will be a new post. On Monday, normality will ensure again until further notice. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, sir. Ha, well, I still need a beret, but I'm getting there. ** Steevee, Hi, Steve, Gotcha, understood, re: Poptimism curation. Well, maybe one of our two local experts will step up. Look forward to your review! Everyone, here's Steeve's review of the new queer Vietnamese film 'Madam Phung’s Last Journey', which begins with this intriguing sentence: 'MPLJ' resembles a Vietnamese Paris Is Burning, with all the exuberance taken out and all the tragedy left in.' I caught two films at the Geneva festival and wonder if you know them. First was a Swiss film, 'Occupy the Pool' by Seob Kim Boninsegi, which was kind of like a Larry Clark film without the sex and repressed queerness, and it was so-so, and 'De L'Ombre Il Y Va' by Nathan Nicholovitch, which a faux-documentary-like fiction film about an older French trans/prostitute in Bangkok, which had a strong first third then got too plotty and unfocused, I thought. How is 'The Danish Girl'? Something about it in theory/advance intrigues me, but I can't figure out why/what yet. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Well, I will ask the possible Poptimism curators politely when I reach them, and fingers crossed. Thanks about Geneva. I think it went okay. Zac said it went okay. We'll see if it went okay enough to the win the jury prize. I think almost for sure not, but ... hey. That's a great Mike Kelley piece, yeah. I can see the Blairish-ish thing. Weird. ** Misanthrope, Speaking of one of the devils. Well, your call, but you or Sypha or both, I guess, would just have to pick let's say 12 to 15 songs, ideally one per artist, and I would set everything up on my end. If you like. Yeah, I don't know, call me ... whatever, but a psychiatrist who goes on TV to give his general opinion and advice just seems in theory like not so serious a psychiatrist to me. People are just different. Truer words hath rarely been spoke. Mm, maybe, about getting away from the gifs entirely, but I'm going to try fooling around with them with no pressure to make fiction out of them first 'cos you never know or something. ** Keaton/Krayton, Hi, Double K. The new Bond is supposed to be, like a throwback or something, I read? Or, like, an attempt to have the entire franchise's history flash before viewers' eyes or something? I'll watch it on a plane where I won't care very much. Pretty much guaranteed. Is that the same guy robbing you that you mentioned before? Hope so, which is a weird thing to say, but I mean hope you're not, like the serial robbee or something. Oh, new story! Asap on my end! Everyone, new story by Keaton aka Krayton over his biog among blogs. Guaranteed fine and percolative read. ** Liquoredgoat, Hey, man. Yeah, I think so too. We'll see what happens, but yeah, I like the idea of PM and me plus Zac's visualization a bunch. I'll report back if anything happens. No, I haven't read Galway Kinnell in a really long time. Not since the '80s maybe. That's a very interesting idea, reading him again, and I'll go with 'TBoN''cos you pressed it and because, well, the title is promising, isn't it? Thanks! ** H, Hi. Vacation from the blog, yeah, although it didn't feel like a vacation in real, but it was cool, and thank you for the luck, which no doubt helped. ** Schlix, Hi, Uli! Yeah, awesome, and thank you again. A really nice circle. Who'd have thunk? Geneva was quick but good. I did a presentation in front of the festival jury and the 'youth jury' and the public. Just explained how it happened and sort of walked them through part of it with the help of a projected version. And people could experience 'ZHH' on their own all during the festival in this place called the Wonderlab. We'll see what transpires. They seemed interested and into it. Definitely will coddle my ears at the Sunn0))). Coincidentally, the worst live music attack on my ears ever was from the opening act at a Wire gig in LA: Melt Banana. It was, like, 12 years ago, and I still have a faint shredded quality to my hearing. You never know with Destroyer, but, yeah, I would guess your ears will be okay. ** S., Hi, S.! But out there is good, right? I think so. Well, generalizing like crazy there. His out there is an out there that I always think I won't be interested in at at all, but his stuff is convincingly something or other. Danielewski and Bret locked podcast-horns or whatever? That's an interesting combo. I'll go find that. ** Sypha, There you are. Do you want to curate a music gig for the blog in the genre of Poptimism? _B_A suggested you and/or Misanthrope for the job. You would just have to pick, let's say, 12 to 15 songs, send me the list -- ideally one song per artist -- and I would set everything up on my end. Interested, per chance? I didn't know about the HPL controversy, but, yeah, it sounds very now. Super weird phase everyone or everything is going through -- this knee-jerk demand of p.c.-ness in everything. Spooky. I hope it's just growing pains or something. ** Kyler, Howdy, man! It's kind of fun over here yeah, it's true. Oh, okay, then it's on to a new publisher then! Out with the old, in with the new! Keep your spirits and confidence way up, bud. ** Right. I introduced the post already, and you know what to do. The blog will see you with a new top half and a truncated, pre-programmredf lower part tomorrow, and I will see you, and everything will be full-fledged, on Monday.