Boys Fight—an artists book by poet Marina Tëmkina and sculptor Michel Gérard—is a response to the emergence of violent factions and nationalist movements over the past decade. These poems and drawings join forces for a “direct hit to the stomach.”

Tëmkina’s fifteen-stanza poem is a rush of language: short, brusque bursts of sentences collapsing into chagrin and exasperated exegesis, conversational asides and digressive laments indexing the traits, facts, and ways in which men, unceasingly, compete. One finds a taxonomy of masculinity in her inventory of big boys, old boys, mainstream boys, golden boys, and girls who look up to boys—all combative, doing intellectual battle, raging and sparring, driven, and treating the world as “a huge fighting ring / an enormous battlefield / an unlimited war zone.”

The poem is paired with mixed-media drawings by Michel Gérard, a sculptor whose large-scale works aim at de-monumentalization and ask us to reconsider the “status of statues.” The drawings included here were inspired by an illustration in the Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré, a popular and practical French-language encyclopedic dictionary first published in 1905.

Author(s): Marina Tëmkina, Michel Gérard
Year: 2023
Pages: 80
Dimensions: 6.25 x 8.75 in.
Cover: Softcover
Language: English