Fall Garment

Stitched together from a kaleidoscope of references/strands that are effervescent, baroque, Jurassic, bedazzled, and harrowing, Paul Cunningham's Fall Garment is like the avant-garde runway fashions from Thom Browne (one of the book's many inspirations), or like the beguiling pieces by the late great Alexander McQueen. It shows you something you never dreamed of before. And you don't understand why you're crying, but you are.
-Kate Durbin, author of Hoarders

Fall Garment has a factory appetite, hungry for what lies beneath the fabric of language. Cunningham-as-tailor drapes the whole enterprise of American commerce over a shoulder, trims our losses tight across a chest. A longing parody of trappings, an ode to all that we've labored out of violence, an elegy of place as industry. The fashioning of fashion. Take a break on the boss's time, turn around, check in on your friends. Together we can ask: if at the centre lies Nature, how did it all get so rotten, can we laugh while we are manufactured as ghosts?
-Noah Ross, author of Active Reception

Fall Garment's linguistic decadence is undercut by grit, pollution, a leaning toward "the number of times you / desired pitch-black" when beauty's resources are used up. In reading Cunningham's singular voice, I'm seduced by a vatic tailor who cuts bolts from the cloth of queer experience, bedazzles them with glass to make them one-of-a-kind (i.e., not susceptible to capitalist greed), and gifts them to those he sees himself in. "A queer tucked in by flowers," he sings to us about why the earth is sore. His luxuriation in language is a palliative to existential devastation.
-Justin Wymer, author of Deed

Lyrical faggotry of the highest order! Paul Cunningham's Fall Garment is hot, wounded, and reptilian.
-Magdalena Zurawski, author of Companion Animal