Praise for Preverbal

…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

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 

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