[09/08/26] Clifton, Rivka: Wrong Feast

Baobab Press, paperback

Publication Date: September 8, 2026

Publisher Marketing:

In Rivka Clifton’s sophomore collection, Wrong Feast, the lyric image, in all its ambiguous potential, flexes the tensions between Capitalism’s mass-produced nightmares and the individually strange experiences of death, art, and queerness to depict a world both sumptuous and awry. In these poems, Clifton engages Charles Simic’s surrealist question: “How to think without recourse to abstractions, logic, and categorical postulates.”  Clifton turns the sensory details in her poems until their most mundane aspects become uncanny–a fish becomes a purse, a dog’s head deified as it is impaled on a fence, a buzzing cellphone birthed into a crib . . . These are not poems of action and consequence but ones of call and response. Page after page, Wrong Feast models close attention. Clifton fully considers the ambiguities and the possibilities within her creations, and she challenges you to do the same.

These poems will not provide lessons or insights. They are not the prophecy garnered from entrails. They are the entrails