Dominus
$18.00
If logos, the law of the father, could be personified, the “Master” of Tiffany Troy’s devastating debut collection Dominus is its Hegelian sine qua non. It follows the journey of a “Baby Tiger” whose lyric powers and canonical, mythic transmutations (of Dostoevsky, Whitman, Machiavelli, Montaigne, and the epic Greeks) evince the apprenticeship of a genius. Is it wrong to “want life to matter” amid a wasteland of toxic positivity, double whoppers, trains, and “fathers beyond reproof”? If work involves subjection, rage, and shame, is poetry—the “Lyrical I” of a “shredded soul”—a higher legislature capable of revolt? Darkly funny, virtuosic, and formally ingenious, Dominus offers a cathartic transcendence from paternalist and systemic oppressions, via a symbiotic power dynamic whose pathos rivals Cordelia and Lear. What Troy forges in this trial by fire isn’t “corporate professional” compliance but a soul: the Nietzschean transformations of her speaker move through "the light Blake calls experience" to arrive at sublimity: "the golden center of the heart."