Gold Hood, by Tessa Shea Whitehead

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Gold Hood is an incantation of fantasies that are undercut before they can root. Here, a dreamy world is conjured and then smashed. Each poem a closely held secret caught between cupped hands. Pretty images float on a dark undercurrent, carried along by the themes of femininity and youth. Gold Hood stares into the gleam of the speaker’s stories and finds the gaps between language and truth. In this work, Tessa Shea Whitehead channels the prophecy of girlhood: tenuous beauty, loneliness, and the edges of danger. Tessa is a writer and immersive theater producer whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Vogue, and other outlets. She is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Columbia University. She often draws from her experience as a professional dancer and subverts traditional femininity with moody, evocative tones and settings. Her poem “B FLAT (A PARTING)” won the Red Noise Collective Poetry Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her writing has been published in Beyond Words, Allegory Ridge, Voicemail Poems, and The Sand Canyon Review. Her short story “Man-Made” was shortlisted for the Fractured Lit Ghost, Fable, and Fairy Tales Prize. Before writing, she was an NFL cheerleader for the Seattle Seahawks.