Tender Data

Poetry. Women's Studies. In TENDER DATA Monica McClure breaks down and breaks into various identities, each of them hashtagged in the discourses of their time and place, whether macha or chiflada, couture or fast fashion, acephale or technocrat: "I want to be so skinny people ask if I'm dying." Down the blood-red lanes of gender-making, class warfare, and vexed relationships goes the unstable subject, hailed yet hailing back. Nobody comes out looking good. The slippery self, surveilled yet ready with her mask, performs a peep show—booth opens wide, yet somehow the dancer isn't there. She's in character. She's "cut off the head to let the humors hose through."

"McClure may be the poster-girl for a new generation of poets: irreverent, well- read, sexy, even dirty, snarky, but ultimately fighting an earnest battle against reductiveness and easy answers to the complex problems of the Internet age: 'Every citizen of this world is on trial / I'm learning to speak legalese / as I stroll through civil law like / a gamine through a sample sale.'"—Craig Morgan Teicher for NPR Books

"Quick-witted and bold, McClure's full-length debut enters the culturally constructed arenas of identity in order to resist and refuse them, arriving at consistently fresh takes on gender, race, and reproduction. McClure's debut is as smart as it is fun."—Publisher's Weekly starred review

"There is constantly a lot of chatter about television shows serving as the voice of a certain group of New York women, whether it's Girls or the far superior Broad City; people want women our age to fit inside a package, to be knowable. Monica McClure's book is the best and least knowable package I've found for experiencing life as a young woman in New York."—Allison Grimaldi- Donahue, Queen Mob's Teahouse

"Among the many ways McClure's poem sheds power is its powerful vulnerability which at times stages an amplified synthetic speaker and at others splits apart that speaker into its component discourses."—Joyelle McSweeney