Praise for Shotgun Seamstress: An Anthology

“A decade later Shotgun Seamstress still holds up. The layouts nail [the] quintessential cut and paste zine aesthetic. Articles ranging from DIY to train hopping and Osa’s interviews, ask the right questions from the Black Punks I want to hear from most. This collection is truly a celebration of all things Black and Punk.” —James Spooner, creator of AfroPunk and author of The High Desert

“Shotgun Seamstress, once passed hand to hand in underground clubs and at activist gatherings, is proof that when theory and practice collide, the result is simply undeniable. Atoe’s book—brimming with interviews, graphics and spectacular essays—adds much to the oft neglected work by and for Black punks. It is also a thrilling work of art, sure to inspire readers around the world. No one who cares about music or history or art or great writing should be without this book.” —Kathleen Hanna, Bikini Kill and Le Tigre

“An archive, a guidebook, and a radical work of art, the collected issues of Shotgun Seamstress thrilled me with every page. Osa Atoe lovingly curates a classic zine experience for any ‘Black weirdo’ in search of community, a new favorite band, or DIY inspiration. For us and by us, this book is a gift.” —Dawnie Walton, author of The Final Revival of Opal & Nev

“Reading Shotgun Seamstress opened up an escape hatch for me, it inspired me to start my first band, to celebrate my heritage and find power in ‘otherness’ that had only felt painful before. I’m so happy this book exists to stoke that fire in me all over again and to spark the fuse in future generations of beautiful Black and Brown weirdos.” —Rachel Aggs, Shopping, Trash Kit, and Sacred Paws

“Black, queer, and always searching, Shotgun Seamstress zine made punk better and Blacker. This life-affirming collection is a road map of possibilities for Black misfits everywhere.” —Chris L. Terry, author of Black Card and Zero Fade

“Shotgun Seamstress is another firm reminder that Black people have been on the punk scene and we are here to stay. The reclamation of the genre, the movement, and the power that came with it are necessary, especially at a time such as now. From James Spooner to Florence Kennedy and Tina Bell, the punk movement is rooted in our history as Black people and I am honored to support those that continue to push for the reclamation of our history.” —Guitar Gabby & The TxLips Band

“Osa Atoe beautifully documents the infinite possibilities that emerge at the intersection of Black, Queer, Feminist, and Punk identities. This collection left me feeling nostalgic, connected, and hungry for change. Shotgun Seamstress is timeless and so needed right now.” —Ebony Flowers, author of Hot Comb

“Shotgun Seamstress is the most genuine record of Black punk in our story. [The anthology] weaves the collective narrative and centers our revolutionary musicians, artists, freethinkers, and communities who archive our struggles, our liberations and our triumphs in the time that it is happening—NOW. Making it the most relevant textbook on a usually moving, lost, and oral tradition, it is the part of history you don’t usually hear about in the mainstream. It’s PUNK AF!” —FUPU

For readers of Susannah Cahalan’s Brain on Fire and Porochista Khakpour’s Sick, this exquisitely wrought debut memoir recounts a lifelong struggle with chronic pain and endometriosis, while speaking more broadly to anyone who’s been told “it’s all in your head”

In Catholic grade school, Emma Bolden has a strange experience with a teacher that unleashes a short-lived, persistent coughing spell—something the medical establishment will later use against her as she struggles through chronic pain and fainting spells that coincide with her menstrual cycle.

In The Tiger and the Cage, Bolden uses her own experience as the starting point for a journey through the institutional misogyny of Western medicine—from a history of labeling women “hysterical” and parading them as curiosities to a lack of information on causes or cures for endometriosis, despite more than a century of documented cases. Recounting botched surgeries and dire side effects from pharmaceuticals affecting her and countless others, Bolden speaks to the ways people are often failed by the official narratives of institutions meant to protect them.

Bolden also interrogates a narrative commonly imposed on menstruating bodies: the expected story arc of marriage and children. She interrogates her body as a painful site she must mentally escape and a countdown she hopes to beat by having a child before a hysterectomy. Only later does she find language and acceptance for her asexality and the life she needs to lead. Through all its gripping, devastating, and beautiful threads, The Tiger and the Cage says what Bolden and so many like her have needed to hear: I see you, and I believe you.

Praise for The Tiger and the Cage

“In The Tiger and the Cage, the call is coming from inside the house—or, rather, from inside the body. In the beautiful prose of a poet, Emma Bolden confronts the patriarchal foundation of the institutions that make our lives what they are: education, religion, medicine. If patriarchy—and frankly, misogyny—is part of medical ‘care,’ then via each surgeon’s scalpel and each prescribed medication, it is also inside us. The Tiger and the Cage opened my eyes, enraged me, and left me in awe of Bolden’s enormous talent as a writer, intelligence as a critic, and courage as a survivor.” —Maggie Smith, author of Goldenrod and Keep Moving

“A harrowing portrait of endurance and grief and resilience. With raw honesty and exacting detail, Bolden tells an intimate story while exploring the demands our oppressive culture places on women—our supposed hopes and dreams, our supposed desires and fears, and most poignantly of all the expectations on our bodies, what they should do and how they should behave. It is part damning critique of our male-dominated medical institutions and, quietly, a loving tribute to a mother-daughter bond.” —Julianna Baggott, author of The Seventh Book of Wonders

“Layer by shimmering layer, Emma Bolden transforms the story of her body into the story of a search for truth. The Tiger and the Cage elegantly interrogates narratives of gender, pain, sexuality, and family to reveal the freedom underneath.” —Angela Chen, author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex

“In brief, lyrical, and powerful essays, Emma Bolden unleashes her story of endometriosis, and the misogyny she endured at the hands of the medical establishment, interwoven with stories of a supportive and loving Southern upbringing. The Tiger and the Cage is a torrent of feeling. It is a left-hook to the jaw to anyone learning for the first time about the neglectful ways women are often treated when their bodies need help. It is a soft, supportive whisper to those of us who know it too well. May it find its way into the hands of doctors and those in training, and their patients, too, who will find a voice in this book, one speaking with clarity and purpose, that affirms their own experiences.” —Chantel Acevedo, author of The Distant Marvels

“Emma Bolden’s The Tiger and the Cage is a memoir written as an investigation, a dive into what it means to be a woman caught in a medical establishment that doesn’t listen to women. I read this book in a fury. Bolden’s imagery is stark and vivid, and the prose moves in a spiral, encircling her pain, her confusion, and her strength. This book will make you laugh, cry, scream, and bleach your hair while you sing along loudly to Tori Amos. I am so grateful The Tiger and the Cage exists and so grateful for Emma Bolden’s generosity.” —Emme Lund, author of The Boy With a Bird in His Chest

“This philosophical, funny, and beautiful memoir is both a work of art and a deep conversation about the rift between mind and body, those two great friends, and rivals, handcuffed together forever. Well-armed with a genuine Greek chorus, a truly excellent and private sense of humor, and incredible gifts for metaphor, Emma Bolden opens the vault for the reader into the true experience of how it feels to both reckon daily with a ravaging illness and also to carry on and make the most of one’s life.

If literature is the great river that runs alongside life, interpreting it, then this book is that river—[it] is deep and vigorous and vital, flashing with transcendence, thinking so richly about the human body, wondering at its mortality and fragility with love and humor and patience and strength.” —Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat and Other Stories

Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll. —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

In Jordan Castro’s inventive, funny, and surprisingly tender first novel, we follow a young man over the course of a single morning as he tries and fails to write an autobiographical novel, finding himself instead drawn into the infinite spaces of Twitter, quotidian rituals, and his own mind.

The act of making coffee prompts a reflection on the limits of self-knowledge; an editor’s embarrassing tweet sparks rage at the literary establishment; a meditation on first person versus third examines choice and action; an Instagram post about the ethics of having children triggers mimetic rivalry; the act of doing the dishes is at once ordinary and profound: one of the many small commitments that make up a life of stability.

The Novelist: A Novel pays tribute to Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine and Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters, but in the end is a wholly original novel about language and consciousness, the internet and social media, and addiction and recovery.

Praise for The Novelist 

Brisk and shockingly witty, exuberantly scatological as well as deeply wise, The Novelist is a delight. Jordan Castro is a rare new talent: an author highly attuned to the traditions he is working within while also offering a refreshingly fun sendup of life beset by the endless scroll.” —Mary South, author of You Will Never Be Forgotten

“No vacuous fad nor commonplace hypocrisy is safe from Jordan Castro. With prose as relentless as it is rhythmic, The Novelist gouges into the status-quo, laying bare the futility of both art and meaningful subversion against a culture of narcissism and instant gratification. Among his biting social commentaries, Castro weaves in shards of unabashed earnestness, even of rue, all of which culminate in a poignant meditation on the creative impulse. The Novelist not only establishes Castro as a fresh force to be reckoned with, but one with rare heart, too.” —Jakob Guanzon, author of Abundance, longlisted for the National Book Award

“I admire the ingenious invention of The Novelist, in which an unnamed writer struggles to write his book, begins to write another book, and ultimately writes this book, which is blunt, earnest, scatological, self-critical, provocative, philosophical, and very fun to read.” —Kathryn Scanlan, author of The Dominant Animal

“Jordan Castro brilliantly manipulates time and perception in The Novelist: A Novel. Prescient, funny, and deeply uncanny, this is a wholly unique book about distractions, digressions, and what it means to make art and live meaningfully while trapped in the bright, narcotic thrall of social media.” —Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light

“This book, better than any other I know, shows how creation emerges from the nothingness of our culture. A hilarious and important novel.” —Michael W. Clune, author of Gamelife and White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin

A searching, galvanizing memoir about blood and love: how learning more about her period, PMS, PMDD, and the effects of hormones on moods transformed her relationships—to a new partner, to family, to non-blood kin, and to her own body—from the beloved essayist and author of Women

Chloe Caldwell’s period has often felt inconvenient, uncomfortable, or even painful. It’s only once she’s in her thirties, as she’s falling in love with Tony, a musician and single dad, that its effects on her mood start to dominate her life. Spurred by the intensity and seriousness of her new relationship, it strikes her: her outbursts of anxiety and rage match her hormonal cycle.

Compelled to understand the truth of what’s happening to her, Chloe documents attitudes toward menstruation among her peers and family, reads Reddit threads about PMS, attends a conference called Break the Cycle, and learns about premenstrual dysphoric disorder, PMDD, which helps her name what she’s been going through. For Chloe, healing isn’t about finding a single cure. It means reflecting on underlying patterns in her life: her feelings about her queer identity and writing persona in the context of a heterosexual relationship; how her parents’ divorce contributed to her issues with trust; and what it means to blend a family.

The Red Zone is a candid, revelatory memoir for anyone grappling with controversial medical diagnoses and labels of all kinds. It’s about coming to terms with the fact that—along with proper treatment—self-acceptance, self-compassion, and transcending shame are the ultimate keys to relief. It’s also about love: how challenging it can be, how it reveals your weaknesses and wounds, and how, if you allow it, it will push you to grow and change.

Praise for The Red Zone

A Nylon Most Anticipated Book of the Year 

A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year 

A Glamour Most Anticipated Book of the Year

The Millions, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year

“This memoir explores finding the language and communication skills to come to terms with emotions and physical pain beyond anything we have ever encountered in media, social or familial conversation, medical treatment . . . I wish it was around back in the 1990s. I’m glad it’s here now. This is one you’re going to buy for the teenager as well as your friends and colleagues in their twenties and thirties. With a love story entwined with a chorus of voices, this is compulsively enjoyable and empowering memoir.” —Lauren LeBlanc, The Observer, Best Memoirs of Spring

“Scintillating . . . [Caldwell] smartly blends the personal and cultural to confront the ways women’s suffering has been dismissed throughout history . . . The result gives a vibrant voice to a struggle that many have been taught to quietly shoulder alone. This is an audacious tribute to women everywhere.” —Publishers Weekly

“Caldwell delves deeply into medical and social aspects of menstruation as well as complex aspects of women’s health, identity, marriage, and family, resulting in a fresh, intimate, and engaging chronicle.” —Booklist

 “Caldwell’s candor about all things menstrual is the greatest strength of this dynamic book . . . [W]omen who suffer from PMDD will take solace in the ups and downs of Caldwell’s journey toward self-acceptance, health, and love. The narrative may also appeal to anyone who suffers frustration and anger in the face of an illness for which they struggle to get an accurate diagnosis, a situation that disproportionately affects women. Provocatively intimate reading.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Not since Elizabeth Wurtzel’s More, Now, Again have I been so obsessed with a book of nonfiction. I read The Red Zone in one day, in one chair, four cups of coffee, and after: a single cigarette. Obsessed.” —Elizabeth Ellen, founder/editor of SF/LD Books, author of Person/a and Her Lesser Work

“Chloe Caldwell invites us to call shotgun on one of her most intimate, moving, and hilarious rides yet! Tinder, THC, Poshmark, WebMD, Prozac, diner eggs, ovulation—The Red Zone has all the highs and lows you come to expect in her delightful nonfiction. Plus, her exploration of PMDD and being a stepmom offers a texture all its own. The Red Zone operates like a love story indeed on so many levels—we readers feel so loved turning every page of this gorgeous offering.” —Porochista Khakpour, author of Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity and Sick: A Memoir

“It’s the greatest love story known to woman: that of herself with her own body. This is deep, wild genius at work—a sharp, generous, questing, very funny book that lays bare the grueling extremes of menstruation. THERE WILL BE BLOOD. And thank god for that. Because we bleed. We bleed and bleed and bleed. As much as they want to pretend we don’t. Chloe Caldwell writes with guts and grace. We are very lucky to have her.” —Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Grown Ups

“The Red Zone: A Love Story is a period memoir as only Chloe Caldwell could write it, with warmth and particularity and charm. I smiled in recognition every few pages, read parts angrily aloud to my husband as though they were his fault, and laughed loudly enough at others to wake up my dogs. Yes, it’s a love story, but The Red Zone is also an adventure, which may sound like a strange descriptor for a book about PMDD until you have experienced it through Caldwell’s wry, piercing, fundamentally optimistic eyes. Both personal and communal, searching and exuberant, The Red Zone will speak to anyone who has been led by pain, curiosity, or misdiagnosis to become a detective of her own body.” —Kristi Coulter, author of Nothing Good Can Come from This

“The necessity and urgency of The Red Zone made me wonder how I—and any woman—had lived so long without it. Through the lens of PMDD and the female body, Caldwell refracts every issue imaginable, from relationships to hormones to queerness to stepmotherhood to blended families, all with hilarity, intimacy, and depth. Feeling seen by this book is an understatement; it’s a survival guide.” —Zaina Arafat, author of You Exist Too Much

“A coming-of-age memoir for those of us in our thirties who are still trying to come of age, Chloe Caldwell’s The Red Zone is an incredible tale of vulnerability, family, and periods. As hilarious as it is heartfelt, and as informative as it is inspirational, here is as honest a tale of self-discovery—and eventual self-acceptance—as has ever been written. A bloody brilliant book.” —Isaac Fitzgerald, author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“Finally (finally!) someone wrote a book about struggling to understand your body and your heart and finding the answers on the internet. This book is moving, funny, and impossible to put down. Caldwell reveals the messiness of life in a way few writers can pull off.” —Chelsea Martin, author of Caca Dolce: Essays from a Lowbrow Life

“Not since Elizabeth Wurtzel’s More, Now, Again have I been so obsessed with a book of nonfiction. I read The Red Zone in one day, in one chair, four cups of coffee, and after: a single cigarette. Obsessed.” —Elizabeth Ellen, founder/editor of SF/LD Books, author of Person/a and Her Lesser Work

“Sentences like poetry, insights like medicine, the most romantic love story, the most spot-on depiction of life in the female body. I needed this book. Chloe Caldwell is among the most important literary voices of our time. Women are going to pass The Red Zone around forever.” —Diana Spechler, author of Who By Fire and Skinny

“The Red Zone is an intense, informative, highly entertaining book about the menstrual cycle, sexism, bickering, divorce, marriage, stepmotherhood, holistic and gradual self-healing, and the layered effort to move from impulsivity and fear to stability and growth.” —Tao Lin, author of Leave Society 

“The Red Zone showcases Chloe Caldwell at her best, with her trademark blend of humor and vulnerability. This is a special book, skillfully balancing practical knowledge with artistic deftness, and sharpness with sweetness.” —Juliet Escoria, author of Juliet the Maniac

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of “fan nonfiction” about living and writing in the age of extinction

In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self.

Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen.

What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another.

Praise for Death by Landscape

“Erotics of compost, vampires, medieval nuns, and solarpunk. Wilk’s ‘fan nonfiction,’ examines the works of Anne Carson, Octavia Butler, Michelle Tea, and more to probe the lines and shapes of ‘weird fiction’ in the face of extinction and all its urgency and anxieties. At the heart of it are questions of how to tell stories that center the Earth as opposed to humans, that help us grapple with the end of the world, and that help us see and be with the dark of it all.” —Snigdha Koirala, Lit Hub, One of the Most Anticipated Books of the Year

“Perhaps ‘essays’ is too slight a description for Death by Landscape, which strikes me as the stealth memoir of a supertaster of the present moment—a citizen of our suffering species who has chosen storytelling as her armor for survival. Whatever you call it, Wilk’s book strengthens me to go on with the essential work, and makes me awfully eager for her next.” —Jonathan Lethem

“This book is amazing. It brought me back to sanity, space, and language.” —Jenny Hval, author of Paradise Rot and Girls Against God  

“Elvia Wilk is one of the most exciting essayists working today. I love this book.” —Catherine Lacey, author of Pew

“It’s rare to come across an essay collection that veers so far into the wilds of weirdness, only to return from these distant outposts with something so deeply honest, vulnerable, and close. Wilk is a writer of exceptional talent, but it is the sheer scale and scope of her curiosity that makes these essays not only unforgettable but intellectually rearranging. Death by Landscape pulls off a wondrous bit of alchemy—it takes what might otherwise be terminus ideas, sites of conclusion, and transforms them into conduits of passage, a way of reassessing what it means to be human in this age of endless unmooring.” —Omar El Akkad, author of What Strange Paradise and American War

“Elvia Wilk’s brilliant interlinked essays show why fiction matters in a time of climate catastrophe, species devastation, and radical inequality. From the old weird to the new, sci-fi to cli-fi, medieval women’s mysticism to larps, Wilk gives us a roadmap through unfamiliar pasts and unsettling presents, pointing toward unpredictable futures that fiction—in its multiple, shifting, compostable forms—enables us to imagine. Treading the fine, impossible line between dystopia and utopia, between trauma, its repetition, and its working through, Wilk doesn’t pretend fiction can fix everything, but she does insist—and she shows—that the effects of fiction ‘are myriad small explosions with far-reaching fragments,’ fragments that help us grapple with what life means and how best to live it while we can.” —Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia 

“I love these weird essays. They do best what weirdness always wants to do: defamiliarize the world around us so that we may better see where we’ve ended up, where we might be going, and who—or what—has been chasing after us all this time. Weirdness, Elvia Wilk writes, ‘provides a sort of methodology for reading stories that lead toward the black hole.’ The stuff (places, people, things) that resists description, challenges our fictions and non-fictions. A black hole is impossible to enter without warping your reality, death beyond death: Wilk scrapes the event horizon and gazes at last into the spooky abyss.” —Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland and MacArthur Park

“Elvia Wilk has written a guidebook and a philosophy for living in a precarious world, in essays that are searching and funny, self-assured and unguarded all at once. With each chapter Wilk directs her telescopic focus on plants and rot, mysticism and black holes, female embodiment and trauma, weaving together seemingly disparate topics with an intelligence that recalls the best of Mark Fisher and Wayne Koestenbaum. Reading Death by Landscape, I feel terrified and exalted, expanded, in awe.” —Madeleine Watts, author of The Inland Sea

“Elvia Wilk is that cool person I want to hang out with at the end of the world. Too smart to despair and too curious to not re-examine even the most studied phenomena (nature, trauma, ambition . . .) until they’re no longer familiar and are catching new light. Death by Landscape is expansive, athletic, weird, and funny.” —Britt Wray, author of Generation Dread and Rise of the Necrofauna

“Elvia Wilk’s learned and bracing essays distribute the mind out beyond the stubborn habits and enclosures of our ‘humanities’—out past hack plots or boundaries assigned to gender or species—where it can expand into subsoil or outer space or corpuscle in narratives weird enough to reflect another human/non-human social life.” —Keller Easterling, author of Medium Design and Extrastatecraft

“Wilk reads the world like an insect reads a garden; her approach is sensory and kaleidoscopic, buzzing beyond manicured surfaces to get at the fertile, loamy rot beneath everything from black holes and science fiction dystopias to martyred saints and larpers. Beautifully brainy, bug-eyed, and weird.” —Claire L. Evans, author of Broad Band

“Elvia Wilk reports on psychic borders, the lines drawn between earth and earthling, plant and steward, healthy and sick. She finds false binaries we hadn’t even thought to count and asks the human to find its humanity, gently but without wavering. Brilliant and swift, as she always is.” —Sasha Frere-Jones, musician and writer

“With evocative clarity and intuitive rigor, Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape guides us through a troubled terrain criss-crossed by that most uncanny of entities, ‘nature.’ This is writing that uniquely extends the tradition of speculative nonfiction, delineating a new constellation of culture and climate that ultimately points to the nebulous horizon of human being itself.” —Eugene Thacker, author of In the Dust of This Planet and Infinite Resignation

“Elvia Wilk’s Death by Landscape is a vivid panoramic meditation on what subjectivity is and might be in relation to its ecological situations—restless enclosure, benevolent dissolution, immersive subsumption—as seen through the unintended epiphanies of trauma. Placed within her frame is a new zoology of characters speaking but not always being heard: sentient plants, celibate lovers, AI co-authors, gnostic mystics, steampunk ruins, and experiencers of unwanted muscle memory, association and dissociation. Wilk is a generous guide to inner and outer worlds and especially to the points where one bends into the other, willingly or not.” —Benjamin Bratton, University of California, San Diego

Exploring the sudden loss of her child, the hope that precedes this crisis, and the suffering that follows, this collection of poetry renders a shattering experience with candor and immediacy

This collection is about the eviscerating loss of a child, the hope that precedes this crisis, and the suffering that follows. Spare, plain, sometimes startling in their snatches of humor, Pollari’s poems careen into the “tilted reality” of grief. This is poetry dredged from shock and rage, then dissected with pointillistic precision.

Many of the pieces are closer to prose: in plain, forceful, language that will capture readers outside the poetry audience, they uncover and name sentiments outside of what is expected in books about child loss and grief: for instance, the embarrassment Niina felt for letting herself feel hope and joy, for revealing that she desired to be a mother at all, and for having to inform the world that her desire would not be granted.

A shattering experience rendered with candor and immediacy, Path of Totality is a book “for anyone who ever expected anything” about a rarely told experience of motherhood.

Praise for Path of Totality

“Pollari writes with straightforward, heartbreaking clarity. These poems are unflinching and powerful yet speak in simple, flat language that suggests everything can suddenly look different after a life-changing experience . . . Pollari has suffered the indescribable and written from that place, showing how fierce love can be, and how unspeakable grief can be endured.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“This poet speaks from the most terrible grief, losing a child, in the most direct way possible. When language begins to fail, she does not fall silent, but moves into a startling metaphorical knowledge: ‘What are you supposed to call the feeling / When you see a star and realize that it corresponds to a map / That it’s just one point in a huge map / Extending over everything like an enormous dark skull.’ The poems are often not dark or sad. Yet they all feel achieved by means of an utterly terrible price. When I read their harrowing truths, I remember the irrefutable necessity of poetry.” —Matthew Zapruder, author of Father’s Day and Why Poetry

“The exquisitely lyric Path of Totality is as gentle and tender as it is fierce and potent . . . Genre feels less important than the shape and shaping of language itself, and Path of Totality is a container woven to fit the content perfectly. Grief is messy, and the work does not deny that. But there is nothing chaotic about these poems. They grasp the raw and honorable honesty that deep sorrow demands, and deliver with startling clarity and attention the impossible, unending experience of loss, yes—but also, the vast emotional landscape of human experience.” —Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne

“It seems impossible this book was written, and with such grace and startling beauty. Amidst utter devastation and pain—hope, even humor emerges, and tenderness for others, and the other-than-human. These poems are the sunflowers growing up through the abyss.” —Kate Zambreno, author of Drifts

“These poems are blisteringly clear, devastated, and oracular, and they brim with the kindness that comes after terrible enlightenment.” —Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People and 300 Arguments

“You hold this book but this book also holds you . . . This book is alive, as painful as that might be to its brilliant writer. It’s not much comfort but not much can comfort—comfort is not in this universe. What suffuses this universe is all the universe holds despite what, and who, is lost. Am I speaking in code? Any reader of this book knows what I’m saying about it—to the reader nothing, not even utter emptiness, is alien. And emptiness is never utter, though it can be uttered and that sound resembles a splash of stars, a milky wash of stark existence, consciousness, connectedness almost unbearably relentless, almost unbearably beautiful.” —Brenda Shaughnessy, author of The Octopus Museum

The cryptic worlds of Hanna and Stranger Things mingle with the dark humor of Dare Me in this debut novel about a teen beauty queen who discovers she’s been a sleeper agent in a deep state government program

After waking up with a strange taste in her mouth and mysterious bruises, former child pageant star Jessica Clink unwittingly begins an investigation into a nefarious deep state underworld. Equipped with the eccentric education of her father, Dr. Clink (a professor of Boredom Studies and the founder of an elite study group known as the Devil’s Workshop), Jessica uncovers a disquieting connection between her former life as a beauty queen and an offshoot of Project MKUltra known as MONARCH.

As Jessica moves closer to the truth, she begins to suspect the involvement of everyone around her, including her own mother, Grethe (a Norwegian pageant queen turned occult American wellness guru for suburban housewives). With the help of Christine (her black-lipsticked riot grrrl babysitter and confidante), Jessica sets out to take down Project MONARCH. More importantly, she must discover if her first love, fellow teen queen Veronica Marshall, was genuine or yet another deep state plant.

Merging iconic true crime stories of the ’90s (Lorena Bobbitt, Nicole Brown Simpson, and JonBenét Ramsey) with theories of human consciousness, folklore, and a perennial cultural fixation with dead girls, MONARCH questions the shadow sides of self-concept: Who are you if you don’t know yourself?

Praise for MONARCH

One of Lit Hub‘s Most Anticipated Books of the Year

“A deeply introspective novel with a notable metaphor for reinvention after trauma in the form of a weaponized pageant girl.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Candice Wuehle had me at ‘Jon Benet Ramsey.’ The poet’s new novel follows a former child pageant star as she discovers ties to her previous glory and a deep state government program. Add an occult wellness guru to the mix, a heaping of mommy issues, and a queer romance for taste and this might just be my ideal book.” —Kerensa Cadenas, Thrillist

“Readers sturdy enough to peer into this glittering, multifaceted novel will find weaponized beauty reflected back.” —Publishers Weekly

“Don DeLillo can only dream of being Candice Wuehle, who’s wrenched the maximalist postmodern novel from the hands of old white men and given it an enticingly feminist spin. MONARCH is a smart, weird, funny gut punch, the kind of book that will blister your brain in the best possible way.” —Rafael Frumkin, author of The Comedown

“This book is really quite sinister, and I mean that in the Latin sense—MONARCH takes the left-hand path through a chilling (and, if you’re honest with yourself, quite real) landscape as Jessica, a decommissioned MKUltra-esque beauty queen, traces back to her origins as such. Along the way, she has to tell the true from the false, which can be difficult when you have a closet full of alters and a lot of gruesome off-label memories.

Underneath it all is a question you can probably relate to even if you aren’t the progeny of a cryogenically preserved mother and a father who lectures on Boredom Studies: How do we know which of our reactions belong to us? How can we tell apart the conditioned self from the one we actually live with, especially when we’ve been trauma-trained into not looking too closely at certain facts? What happens when our frozen selves start to thaw?

If you’ve always been suspicious of the institutions of childhood, beauty, and sentimentality, this book is for you. If you crave a frosty narrative voice with the whip and torque of a bitchy gymnast, this book is for you. It will make you smarter. And it will also upset your schema for the world—but you’ll be glad, I promise.” —Sarah Elaine Smith, author of Marilou is Everywhere

“In this riddled pageantric, insomniac, photographic, and university-infused world of eating disorders, triple suicides, astral projections, enigmatic bruises, and uncontrollable impulses, Candice Wuehle’s poetic and narrative gaze on everything she Midas-touches is eyelined, eyeshadowed, polished, Norwegian lip-penciled, and loose powdered with her devilishly inventive, singularly imaginative beauty and a devastating wry sense of humor. Her brilliance in MONARCH will lacquer, enamel, and wax you and turn your mind inside out like a monarch butterfly macerated in emulsion.” —Vi Khi Nao, author of The Vegas Dilemma and Swimming with Dead Stars

“A wise, unsettling, and multifaceted masterpiece, MONARCH succeeds on all levels—as a portrait of an endearingly dysfunctional family, as a shadow history of Y2K and the hidden power structure underlying and undermining contemporary life, and as a profound exploration of the extremely dicey prospect of being a self in a body in the world. Unless you’re hiding in an underground city or frozen in a kryokammer in the desert, you’ll want to run out and get this one right away!” —David Leo Rice, author of The Dodge City Trilogy, Angel House, and Drifter: Stories