25 pages
Published 2024
Read February 19
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
A digital chapbook from the author of The Saint of Witches, The Thirteen Scorned Wives of La Nuit takes the contemporary poetry in-joke — we’re all in love with the moon, who is a beautiful lesbian! — and pares through it with knives. These are poems of self-dissection, of opium and absinthe, of calcified hearts, of bones caught in the throat. We straddle dragons despite (or because of) the burns they leave on our thighs. The moon is an apathetic mistress: Now, Avra writes in “ii - Celeste,” everything drips silver / And suffocating.
This is a stunning gleam of a book, over almost before you can process its first words. Each poem swoons, half asphyxiated, into the next, a sprawling tapestry of injury sewn in exquisite and unexpected detail: Squeezing pomegranate pulp / Out of hollow bones (“v - Harriet”).
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