Bundle: Preverbal and Philomel, Whose Reputation Precedes Her

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Praise for Philomel, Whose Reputation Precedes Her

There is so much to admire about Philomel, Whose Reputation Precedes Her: the invented form, which is both birdsong and trauma; the balance of irony and intimacy; the images, some of which are so precise and strange I think I will never forget them; the brilliant, stop-you-in-your-tracks lines, not infrequent, like this: “Whether you’re living or not often comes down to figurative language.”

—Ross Gay, Author of Against Which & Be Holding

I want to walk the earth and always have Ryle’s words in my ear. Listen to this: “the hummingbird, so named for the accident/of his body,” “what is a poem but running/as fast as I can,” and “imagine puberty with feathers and your eye swelling/like a berry under pressure.” Who else can spin this way? The book will take you into “some days it’s like I hadn’t any skin on at all” but it will also show you “a dozen rabbits falling from the sky.” Essential, stunning, breathtaking, unique. Everyone must read this book.

— Kelly Ritter, author of A Thousand Wings, Ghost Act, and Just After

Praise for Preverbal

Carroll Beauvais’ Preverbal is a searing book about love, family, and grief, its setting not the world we imagine but the one we actually live in: with its “puddles of catheter urine [and] pools of blood,” its Spanish moss like a lost mother’s hair in the trees. These are fearless, unflinching poems from a writer who knows how to summon her ghosts and make them sing.

—      Patrick Phillips, author of Song of the Closing Doors and Elegy for a Broken Machine

…her moving debut Preverbal is a tremendous book that refuses to sterilize the risk of recollection, insistent on sharpening the razor’s edge of any backwards understanding. The numinous byproduct of Beauvais’s willingness to complicate the apertures she aims at the past is a transformative chorus of new meanings that resonate between then and now. Or, as she puts it, “Let that journey ruin itself, and in ruining, resurrect.” Bless the emergence of this sacred voice and all the light she looks to revive from loss.

— Geffrey Davis, author of Revising the Storm and night angler

Beauvais knows that what lies in that unreachable place beneath language needs precise words to coax it out and manifest it as something that sustains us. Her voice, taut, lyrical, and unblinking, manages this arduous and delicate task with grit and grace. Hers is a debut that demands our attention and fulfills the highest level of poetry’s ambition: connection to what makes us human.

—  Chris Kennedy, author of The Strange God Who Made Us