Empty Clip

The poems of Empty Clip bore into the cultures of violence in the United States while candidly cross-firing upon the poets’ complicity and testifying on these cultures’ effects upon female body image and mental health. From a meditation about a bullet hole-animated PowerPoint presentation on campus shooters to the startled invective against an unprovoked dick pic, lyrics brooding upon illness-driven suicidal thoughts to narratives about a slippery memory of childhood abuse, Emilia Phillips’s third poetry collection sears with the “angry love” of self, in order to find some truth that’s nevertheless “a broken bone that can’t be / set.”