Where is a softness that doesn’t feel like a costume?
Does caring mean hoarding or dissemination?
Sugarblood is spilling over with contaminants, soft intrusions, illness, animal instinct, medicine, and vengeance. Liz Bowen asks what it means to care for one another when emotions involve labour, and how our desires are so readily surveilled, scrutinized, and gendered. The result is a thrilling challenge, a warm panic, and an opportunity for us to reconsider function, care, and intimacy. Cunning and sharp, these poems are armour against that which threatens us, and an emotionally resonant testament to all that which keeps us safe and contained in a dangerous world. In effect, Bowen gives form to the feeling of simply being too much.
Liz Bowen is a writer, scholar and editor living in New York City. She is a doctoral student in English and comparative literature at Columbia University, where she also teaches undergraduate writing. Her work focuses on 20th/21st-century American literature, disability studies, animal studies, post-humanism, and feminist and queer theory. Her poetry and essays have been published widely in literary magazines and anthologies. Sugarblood is her debut poetry collection.
Cover art by Fin Simonetti
Author photos by Tramaine George
Softcover, perfect-bound, b/w
First edition, first printing