If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough's poem, "Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]" have grown "tired & suspicious of poetry" Women...

If you, like the speaker in Laura McCullough's poem, "Almost Nothing Something [stars / plates / cells]" have grown "tired & suspicious of poetry" Women & Other Hostages will absolutely revitalize you. These are riveting, wholly moving narratives of a life lived. Out of sorrow McCullough invokes a stunning grace where "What is stripped from you" becomes a gift because "what's left behind is all your own." Women of all circumstances inhabit these poems. They shed their skin like snakes, "memory in flesh," and consider the bones of what holds us together in these divisive times. This beautiful book will knock loose what is lodged in your heart.

-Suzanne Frischkorn

Early in this collection, McCullough offers this: Tilt back your neck; expose your throat. / You know you want to be devoured. Each of these poems contains universes that quiver with desire, in one form or another. With heat. Both the fear of it as well as the joy. Desire is the engine that got us here, yet these poems push even beyond that, beyond forgiveness even, beyond this cage we all inhabit, out and into the deeper mysteries-don't I know what it is like / to walk in a cloud of my own making?

- Nick Flynn

Author: Laura McCullough
Publisher: Black Lawrence Press, Inc.
Published: 06/18/2021
Pages: 80
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 8.40h x 5.40w x 0.40d
ISBN: 9781625578396

About the Author
McCullough, Laura: - Laura McCullough is the author of WOMEN AND OTHER HOSTAGES (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), JERSEY MERCY (Black Lawrence Press, 2016), RIGGER DEATH AND HOIST ANOTHER (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), and SPEECH ACTS (Black Lawrence Press, 2010). Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry, Georgia Review, American Poetry Review, The Writer's Chronicle, Guernica, The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, and many other journals and magazines. She has been awarded two NJ State Arts Council Fellowships, one in poetry and one in prose and has had scholarships, fellowships, or residencies at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Nebraska Summer Writers Conference, Sewanee Writers Conference, the Vermont Studio Center, the Virginia Center for the Arts, the Betsy House, and Marble House. She has been a Dodge Poetry Festival poet, a Florida Writers Circuit poet, and a Decatur Book Festival poet. She teaches in the Sierra Nevada College Low-residency MFA program.