Glorious Veils of Diane
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2021)
Blood Diary (Mother):
March 14, 1993
Come into the dark kitchen to see Diane on a step stool cooking meat.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhh…
“Happy birthday Diane,” she whispers to me in the dark.
“Unpredictable and terrifyingly familiar, Glorious Veils of Diane is a revelation—in prose poems that stain the mind long after reading. For Diane, horror is a comfort, a realm of safety to a trans body made monstrous to itself. Choral and haunting, images and language fragments fold in and out of this story, and Oet unsettles with an artful grace.”
— Chase Berggrun
“Rainie Oet is a brilliant new writer with the power to make you see things you’ve never seen before with stunning clarity. Glorious Veils of Diane is a mysterious beauty, a fiery wonder.”
— Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
“Glorious Veils of Diane is complex, mysterious, finely wrought, and formally daring. Rainie Oet is a young writer to watch.”
— George Saunders
Blood Diary (Diane):
March 14, 1993
Blood moon coming, half-moon.
I am like the half-moon.
I am coming to
kill what I love.
Notes
* Excerpts are first and last poems in the book.
* Graphic narrative drawn by Alice Blank first appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review.