Every single poem in Alexus Erin's Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence comes directly from the mouth. This is an important voice that makes us question what happens when we hold on tighter to the ever-passing commercials and pixelated cartoons, questioning and voicing our true realities, especially in the contexts of violence and injustice. Erin's full-length debut is an ars poetica that makes us jump into love–this is a book of constant focal points and priceless camera asides–it will make you hungry. - Dorothy Chan, Revenge of the Asian Woman
In Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin transmogrifies her sure-tongued words into Acme-type explosives, defying physics to puncture reality's patchwork. From the star-shaped holes her poems cut, golden hour light illuminates divinity in stillness and brutality: holy incense rising from a post-prom coffee, the hollow erasure that comes with grief, and the gut-punch pleasures of choral chord changes and pop-punk push pits. Her sleight-of-hand etymological slicing makes detours for Medieval cantatas, 1960s sitcoms, dreams, dances, desserts, and so much more–a giddy trajectory that traces lucid, crucial messages in smoke across the bright celluloid sky. - Sadie Dupuis of Speedy Ortiz and Sad13
In Cartoon Logic Cartoon Violence, Alexus Erin shows the heartbeat beyond the pixels of human perception to the pains and joys therein. These poems journey, with a relentlessly curious and personal speaker's voice, from loss to body image to the multifaceted Black experience. In this book, we are illuminated as if on a technicolor screen. We vibrate with inescapable life. - Ashley M. Jones, author of REPARATIONS NOW! and Alabama Poet Laureate
Alexus Erin's words defy gravity. Not just in their elastic critique of how the world runs out of road for Black folks, but in the stretching of space & logic. In this brilliant debut collection, Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence, Erin's poems push past the limitations of this dimension & offer a close-eyed intimate navigation of a world by hand. We watch the hands drawing the boundaries of this world with Erin's words, its positioning, its havoc . . . This collection is electric. - Nabila Lovelace, author of Sons of Achilles and editor at Divedapper
Alexus Erin knows there is a "tide to turn" – these poems are the storm to swell the water. Cartoon Logic, Cartoon Violence investigates the complexity of life at the intersections: between Blackness and being "wholly and entirely a woman," between portrait and caricature, between fixture and fleeting mirage. These poems gaslight, they hide, they accuse, they flaunt, they speed off the edges of cartoon cliffs and hang there – "gravity negated by fear" – all in the name of steadying our gaze on ourselves. Look deeper. "How else does one encounter the God / question?" Truly, an expansive work. - Adam Falkner, author of The Willies
