Electric Lit's Best Poetry Collection of 2023

An NPR Best Book of 2023

New York Times 'The Shortlist' Pick

 

Vulture Most-Anticipated Book of Winter

Chicago Review of Books Must-Read

The Millions Must-Read

"Thrillingly bold... unique... rupturing the division between the domestic and the primal to both delicate and brutal ends."
—Library Journal starred review

“Stunning… nearly impossible to put down…” —Autostraddle

"Elegant... dazzling... faces grim truths and draws hard lines"
—The New York Times Book Review

"Gripping" —The Seattle Times

“A sharp-eyed debut" —Poets & Writers

"A  stunner. . . . Haunted, funny, and profound." —Shondaland

"...so sharp it leaves one breathless" —Chicago Review of Books

"A living thing... beautiful and devastating and real"
—The Arkansas International

"The words leap off the page. Bates will be a lasting voice in the modern poetry landscape.” —Debutiful

“…reveals the deception, purchase, and stakes of human behavior.” —Poetry Foundation

"Haunting" —Alta Journal

"This collection bites, and soothes, and bites again—you won’t be able to quite catch your breath, and you won’t want to." —Buzzfeed

"Exceeds its promise... beautifully wrought... I'm not saying Bates is leading us to slaughter, but I'd follow her even if she were" —Mid-American Review

"Lives on the blade-edge between forebears Carl Phillips and Brigit Pegeen Kelly—intimate and intoxicated and charged with violence; rooted in scripture, wilderness, home spaces. . . . and the mythic worlds we construct to sustain or drive ourselves." —The Adroit Journal

"[filled] with intense imagery and surprising truths" —Publishers Weekly

"Bates offers in her poems lessons on how to move forward toward health and safety, and a thriving creative and emotional-spiritual interior, without letting go of who we are and where we came from, painful though it can be to bring ourselves, fully, into the light."
—The Rumpus

"Expansive, sure, and sharp." —Southern Review of Books

“Outstanding... poems that arrive at the level of the senses already in motion, like the back of an animal velvet-warm and writhing beneath the hand.” —Powell’s City of Books

"Remarkable... one of America’s most unique voices."
—The Poetry Question

"Arresting" —New England Review

"I’ve written elsewhere that the border between the sacred and the profane is porous, but Bates’s debut makes me wonder if such a border even exists. [O]riginal... hypnotic" —The Millions

"Brutal and beautiful" —Cunning Folk

"What resonates. . .  is that desire to experience a fundamental love, even if it’s illusory." —Washington Independent Review of Books

"Ravishing... refuses to flinch, or cease longing" —Garden & Gun

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