Heather Knox’s Dowry Meat is a gorgeous, tough-as-nails debut that arrives on your doorstep hungry and full of dark news. There’s damage here, and obsession, and more haunted beauty in the wreckage of just about everything—relationships, apartment clutter, rough sex, the body, and of course the just-post apocalypse—than you or I could hope to find on our own. These are poems that remind us not that life is hard—that old news—but that down there in the gravel and broken glass is where the truth-worth-hearing lies, and maybe the life worth living. If you were a city, Knox tells us, unflinching as always, I’d… read your graffiti. Drink your tap water./Feel your smog and dirt stick to my sweat… If you were a city, I’d expect to be robbed.

• Jon Loomis, author of Vanitas Motel (winner of the FIELD prize) & The Pleasure Principle—Dowry Meat’s apocalyptic fever dream myth-making bleeds into what we might call the poetry of witness or the tradition of the confessional, except that these lines throb with lived experience and a body isn't necessarily a confession. Heather Knox’s poems are beautifully wrought and beautifully raw.
• Dora Malech, author of Shore Ordered Ocean & Say So—Heather Knox’s debut collection is a lyric wreath made of purulent ribbon and the most inviting of thorns. Tansy and tokophobia, lachrymosity and lavage are braided together in this double collection, which marries a sci-fi Western narrative to a lyric sequence. Both elapse in an impossible location made of opposites—futuristic nostalgia, or erotic displeasure—otherwise known as the universe in which we (attempt to) live.
• Joyelle McSweeney, author of The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults & Salamandrine: 8 Gothics