RIVIERE, Sam
Kim Kardashian’s Marriage

Kim Kardashian’s 2011 marriage lasted for 72 days, and was seen by some as illustrative of the performative spectacle of celebrity life. Whatever the truth of this (and Kardashian’s own statements refute it), Riviere has used the furore as a point of ignition, deploying terms from Kardashian’s make-up regimen to explore surfaces and self-consciousness, presentation and obfuscation, in the 72 poems that make Kim Kardashian’s Marriage. His approach eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. For the process of enquiry involves the composition method itself, in poems that have been produced by harvesting and manipulating the results of search engines to create a poetry of part-collage, part-improvisation. The effect is as refractive as it is reflective, and disturbs the slant on biography until we are left with a pixellation of the first person. Kim Kardashian’s Marriage is a captivating examination of artifice and reality, privacy and exposure, and an uncanny commemoration of the contemporary moment. [publishers’ note]

Published by Faber & Faber, 2015
Poetry