Unbecoming Behavior

Consider yourself
at home in this poem, pounding
through the night, in her head
they keep up the construction—
a preemptive network of unmade beds

Part autobiography, part revisionist biography of Jane Bowles, Unbecoming Behavior is Kate Colby’s attempt to “wind [herself] like a stripe to a pole” in order to catch an honest glimpse of herself "in the corner of [her own] eye.” The long poem is about personal historicity, persona, performance, femininity, travel, exile, home, storytelling, and the act of writing itself.

Kate Colby is the author of Fruitlands (Litmus Press, 2006), winner of the Norma Farber First Book Award, and chapbooks from Anadama and Belladonna*. Recent work has appeared in Aufgabe, New American Writing and Vanitas. She grew up in Massachusetts and has recently moved to Providence after 11 years in San Francisco.

To use her own words, Kate Colby’s poetry “cannibalizes” and "interbreeds” with itself, with the author’s life, and with the work and life of Jane Bowles, the great 20th century fiction writer and playwright. This booklength poem creates its own trajectory—a set of rapid explosions which transform into caresses. Colby’s harmonics—graceful, melodic, fluid and dissonant by turn—work in counterpoint to the relentless flow of fragments and blurs. Unbecoming Behavior is hyper-active to the extreme, and a step onwards. – Lewis Warsh

Nomadism, childhood, travel, home, and Jane Bowles’ life and work walk on, around and star in this gorgeous staging ground of language complete with “fricative fronds.” Want hot pursuit of meaning? Jane is constant in flight and anchor through Colby's bold, acrobatic word play, where one line surprises another. Syntactic gymnastics name the Jane. Jim Thompson makes a cameo stroke. Thank the gods! If you have a diamond ring, go pawn it for all of Ugly Duckling Presse’s editions and especially Kate Colby's Unbecoming Behavior that dares to say on the page what no one would speak. – Gloria Frym

"Kate Colby has a gift for blending observation with lyric energy and wit." – Elizabeth Willis (about Colby's Fruitlands)