Post-Volcanic Folk Tales [Paperback]

This ferocious debut reads like no other. Where grief and exuberance dance under an encauldroned blood moon, mellifluous pyrotechnic This formally restlessindeed, volcaniccollection disgorges poems of testimony and supplication, unsettling yet embodied, mercurial yet real. Ravenously, Mackenzie Polonyi embraces her maternal genealogy, transforming tragic histories of violence into a lyrical lament of immense linguistic intensity. This is poetry that turns lack into excess, elegy into a procession of alchemical adjectives, pain into a fever of the figurative. Opening this book is akin to entering a butcher shop where a girl-childraised secondhand homesickhas been hoarding her grief between sugared milk and vinegar. Her rebellion against speechlessness is mounting page after page: The history of a daughter is growing a garden of blood for a wound with a stomach of air that will swallow time like a mirror. In Mackenzie Polonyis stunning debut collection, the human body becomes a landscape inscribed by multigenerational story, memory, and trauma. In these visceral lyric poems, boundaries between self and nature dissolve. Polonyi unearths ancestral connectionsstone ruins cob-webbing my sternumas her symptoms and injuries merge with her suspended yet rooted foremothers own ruptures. An alchemical blend of folklore and science preserves rituals like pigeon-milk tonics amid seismic turbulence, propelling Polonyis searing language. Wonderfully kaleidoscopic in its exploration of a scattered and often uncertain identity, this book transports readers into realms where memories ossify into rusted peafowl-blue relics. Blistering yet nurturing,