Zombie Vomit Mad Libs

Duy Doan

• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781949944686
• eBook ISBN: 9781949944402
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

In Zombie Vomit Mad Libs, the climate has changed, and what mostly remains are zombies meandering through a world where we only have brief memories—where connection (human and zombie) is now only made possible thanks to bits of the salvaged wreckage that was left behind in the apocalypse. The poems pay homage to horror movies, riff on childhood mad libs, and scatter Vietnamese diacritics over text about iPhones, neurotransmitters, phobias, substance abuse, fleas, and vomit. The stakes are high: these pages are preoccupied with suicide from the start, especially with the deaths and legacies of poet Anne Sexton and Hong Kong actor/singer Leslie Cheung, but they also find ways to smile and serve from fixed narratives, which is where the zombies come to the forefront, wandering through a world where our only shared experiences are fading memories of the final times we encountered chance momentousness in our lifetimes. Macabre humor is combined with formal inventiveness. Drawing from broad swaths of history, literature, and pop culture, the forms in this book and the rewriting of conventional zombie narratives enable the poems to avoid the presumptuousness of wisdom. The poems instead expend their energy through playfulness, unassuming declarative statements, and sparse questions. Folks who love horror movies, especially the little theaters of love and friendship in these films, might appreciate the candor and arrangement of data in lieu of insight and wisdom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contagion
• Zombie
• Oxytocin
• Fleas,
• iPhone VC
• Zombie
• Poet Suicides, Thirteen-Pentameter Sonnet
• Mad Lib with Anne Sexton
• Sonnet with Poets in It
• A Little Bit Dopamine, a Little Bit Conversation
• 2046 is on the 24th floor
• Zombie Babies
• Let the Right One In — First Meeting Scene (in rewind)
• Zombie Babies
• “Tale of the Tape”
• Zzzzz Zombies
• Everything Means Nothing Compares
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night — First Kiss Scene
• Dopamine
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night — First Kiss Scene
• Zombies at a Cross Signal
• Oxytocin — Siblings
• Kissing Santa
• The Autobiography of Frogs
• A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night — First Kiss Scene
• Zombie
• Zombies
• Alcoholism
• High We Are
• Two Zombies
• Buddy and Butterscotch, Water Goat in the Year of the Water Snake
• Sonnet the Hedgehog
• Your Brother’s Wedding Day
• Giggling
• Confession Therapy
• Epigraph
• Details
• Epitaph
• Flight Attendant,
• Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story
• Zombie
• The James Merrill House
• Oxytocin — A Rabbit, a Horse
• Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)
• Tty’alll etc.
• Zombies
• Hi, Quasimodo (inching out of a dark place in which he is very sad and _____ wants to not be here)
• Endorphins
• Mechanical Pencil
• Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror — First Goodbye Scene (intertitles remix)
• Last Breath Before Sheep
• 14
• Mad Lib with _____ in It
• Brevity
• Leslie Cheung in A Chinese Ghost Story
• Hart <3
• Zombies
• Serotonin — The Thirtieth Week of the Year of the Earth Pig
• Year of the Dogs, Year of a Synapse
• Two Scenes from I Walked with a Zombie
• “Wong Kar-wai Cat”
• Norepinephrine — Suicides in Fiction Say Goodbye
• Norepinephrine — Three Methods
• Zombie
• Zombie
• Zombie
• Zombie
• Notes
• Acknowledgments