The Splooge Factory
Author: Christina Springer
Imprint: Frayed Edge Press
ISBN: 9781642510041 (pbk.)
Physical description: 5.5x8.5; 75 p.
This collection of poetry arose from the author's experiences as the fill-in receptionist at an "adult services" massage parlor in Pittsburgh. Informed by theories of feminized eroticism and a feminist inquiry of power dynamics, these poems reflect the real stories of the real women who worked there.
Christina Springer is an Alt.Black artist who uses text, performance, video, and other visual expressions to communicate what the space between molecules in the air wish for you to know. Her work has been published widely in a variety of poetry journals, including Obsidian, Eyedrum Periodically, The Drunken Boat, and Callaloo. She was the longest-reigning Pittsburgh Poetry Slam champion.
"As playful as it is shocking, sexy, and woke, Christina Springer’s The Splooge Factory invites the reader into the daily grind of sex work.
And while it takes on race, culture, desire, and power, it also pushes the reader to rethink their own expectations
of sex, the body, and the business of wanting."
Adriana E. Ramírez, 2015 PEN-Fusion Awarding-Winning Author of DEAD BOYS
"Springer tells us what sex workers have always told us about our desires: they are our ass-out political and psychological truth.
In exposing desire rife with undercurrents of racial injury and gendered insult, The Splooge Factory tells us what we purchase and project in service of something more sinister than lust. The voices of sex workers, named by ethnic and racial specialty, who are centered in this factory, “exploit/politically incorrect//yearnings. Knit/sexual satisfaction/from the unconscious/yarn of prejudice.” The intimate labors of this work, The Splooge Factory made plain: to make sense—explode sense of social order and to place at center female desire. Deeply embodied, and otherwise intimate, in these pages we are faced with the no-difference difference of work and life where one finds “vulnerability/ at arm’s length.”--Bettina Judd, Author of patient.
"Springer shows us how collective hatred and sexual objectification of powerless “others” (who are, sometimes, ourselves)
enter the economy ....[She] uses the good poetry of irony and linguistic experiment as
a counter-magic to the bad poetry that monetizes vulnerability."
Hester L. (“Lee”) Furey, Author of Little Fish: Poems
The Poetry Question
https://thepoetryquestion.com/2019/08/08/review-the-splooge-factory-christina-springer-frayed-edge-press/
"It’s unusual for us to review a book of poetry here on Voodoo Universe, but The Splooge Factory is an unusual book. It artfully explores
the interstices of gender, sex, power, repression, oppression and release."
Voodoo Universe with Lilith Dorsey
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/voodoouniverse/2019/03/review-the-splooge-factory-by-christina-springer/