Dowry Meat

Heather Knox's Dowry Meat is a gorgeous, tough-as-nails debut that arrives on your doorstep hungry and full of dark news. There's damage here, and obsession, and more haunted beauty in the wreckage of just about everything-relationships, apartment clutter, rough sex, the body, and of course the just-post apocalypse-than you or I could hope to find on our own. These are poems that remind us not that life is hard-that old news-but that down there in the gravel and broken glass is where the truth-worth-hearing lies, and maybe the life worth living. If you were a city, Knox tells us, unflinching as always, I'd... read your graffiti. Drink your tap water./Feel your smog and dirt stick to my sweat... If you were a city, I'd expect to be robbed. - Jon Loomis, author of Vanitas Motel (winner of the FIELD prize) & The Pleasure Principle -- Dowry Meat's apocalyptic fever dream myth-making bleeds into what we might call the poetry of witness or the tradition of the confessional, except that these lines throb with lived experience and a body isn't necessarily a confession. Heather Knox's poems are beautifully wrought and beautifully raw. - Dora Malech, author of Shore Ordered Ocean & Say So -- Heather Knox's debut collection is a lyric wreath made of purulent ribbon and the most inviting of thorns. Tansy and tokophobia, lachrymosity and lavage are braided together in this double collection, which marries a sci-fi Western narrative to a lyric sequence. Both elapse in an impossible location made of opposites-futuristic nostalgia, or erotic displeasure-otherwise known as the universe in which we (attempt to) live. - Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults & Salamandrine: 8 Gothics