Rose Knapp is a poet & electronic music producer. She has publications in Lotus-Eater, Bombay Gin, BlazeVOX, Hotel Amerika, Gargoyle, & others. She has poetry collections with Hesterglock Press and Dostoyevsky Wannabe. She currently lives in Minneapolis.
Find her at Twitter: @rose_siyaniye Instagram: @roseknapp_ Facebook: Rose Knapp Website: roseknapp.net
part 2
Introduction to Shadow Beings
Shadow Beings is an exploration of individual consciousness. An exploration of the shadow self and the possibility of the existence of spiritual beings beyond the human.
Part autofiction style poetry, part pure abstract expressionism, and part chaotic Dadaism, Shadow Beings synchronizes and distorts realms of mental illness, Gnostic mythologies, the nature of evil, psychedelic consciousness, and being trans.
Shadow Beings takes a minimalist approach to poetic form, approaching short forms as just as expressive as longer or more narrative forms.
Preview of Shadow Beings
Words of Praise
“Performative, archaic- elegiac-elegant, poet and electronica music producer Rose Knapp’s micro poem opus, Shadow Being, exists in a post-chart-heart-stomping-zone, an expanded hall of gallerist rooms, world/word symphonics, on a buzzing island beyond capacity for standing-room only, carving a cavernous sculptural associative prescience, a rave, a shimmering sheen of subversive operations eviscerating heteronormative zones.
Queering space and time, Shadow Beings is fierce, political, and experimental, of necessity, a voluminous poetics raining down joyfully, writhing with scar/skirmishes, exculpating tropes, edging towards a carnivalesque-generous spiritual empyrean.
Kinetically aerobic in disruptions, turning language and philosophical cultural word-associations on their heads, the book is a field of circulating signs of bliss, indulging vigorous cartographies, sibylline & oracular, all (utopia)n/dystopia & thorough checkmate.
Shadow Beings is a beautiful read, a sculptural porous mesh, a journey inside religio-cultural detritus, employing deft & erudite sublime(overwriting) among other strategies, where clashing paganism meets hedonism, to crash in waves interrogatively against the sprawling mauling-detoxed-thrall of persistent Judeo-Christian hegemonies. Knapp continues her operational critiques of master-narrative authority, jettisoned through her persistent, immaculate juxtapositional strategies.”
- Robert Frede Kenter, author of EDEN (Floodlight Ed) & publisher/EIC at Ice Floe Press.
“The feeling Shadow Beings leaves you with is one of awe, excitement, and wonder. The energy that Knapp infuses within this collection makes every word electric. The narratives that Knapp creates with only 3-5 lines have such a unique sense of imagery. Shadow Beings is a beautifully crafted collection.”
- Leia, Writer and Head Editor of Full House Literary Magazine
“Shadow Beings is a masterful and magical journey through what it is to be alive. Spanning forms and themes with agility and fluidity, Rose Knapp leads us down a rabbit hole of consciousness, reflecting the multitudes of the mind through individual flashes of thoughts and feelings which crescendo into a complex and compelling picture, treading the line between the relateable human experience, and the alienation of being an individual in the vastness of the universe. Every reading brings something new, refreshing and powerful.”
- Helen Bowie, poet, editor, WORD/PLAY out with Beir Bua Press.
“Shadow Beings transmutes circular marbles, zapping along in fast eddies of marshmallow rivers while reading your horoscope, biting on yesterday’s wishes and tomorrows truth – this is hope, this is ASMR for the weary, the “too smart,” and melted crayons for our inner child. I loved these potent poems, well done Rose Knapp.”
- Michelle Moloney King, poet, editor, Beir Bua.
Beir Bua Press 