Kim Kardashian's Marriage

A captivating examination of artifice and reality, privacy and exposure from a Forward Prize-winning poet

The 72 poems in Kim Kardashian's Marriage mark out equally sharpened lines of public and private engagement. 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. His approach eschews a dependence upon confessional modes of writing to explore what kind of meaning lies in impersonal methods of creation. The process of enquiry involves the composition method itself; the poems 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.

Sam Riviere studied at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and holds a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from University of East Anglia. He is the author 81 Austerities (Faber & Faber, 2012), which won the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, and Standard Twin Fantasy (f.u.n.e.x., 2014), a pamphlet of poems. He was a recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award.