Beautyberry

To quote Mary Jo Bang, "This is a book of boundaries, objects, intersections. A book of multiple selves caught in the midst of self-definition. A book of conflagrations ("my hair / yesterday's / fire caught / in a disaster"). A book inhabited by all the poets who came right up to the edge over which this book falls ("I consider any verge / a haunting"). A book by a daughter of Dickinson but of this moment. This book is not afraid to address abstractions: What is the beloved? What is a body? What is knowledge? This book barrels toward showing us what can't be told. If I could, I would quote every word of this book. Instead, you should read it. "The words fall out, click against the table."   Queer poet and writer Cass Donish was born and raised in the Greater Los Angeles Area. They are the author of the poetry collections Your Dazzling Death (Knopf, 2024); The Year of the Femme (University of Iowa Press, 2019), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Beautyberry (Slope Editions, 2018). Their nonfiction chapbook, On the Mezzanine (Gold Line Press, 2019), was selected for publication by Maggie Nelson. Their writing has appeared in The American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Gettysburg Review, Guernica, The Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, Poem-a-Day, VICE, and elsewhere. Donish received an MA in cultural geography from the University of Oregon, an MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis, and a PhD in English and creative writing from the University of Missouri. They live in Columbia, Missouri with their partner and four cats.