I Own Nothing and I Belong Nowhere

In her startling debut, Alivia Francis prays, drinks, bathes, aches, tickles, whispers, and dreams. She eats apples with jam. She wraps fingers around other fingers. She's scorned and condemned. She loves and is loved. She asks for forgiveness from her knees. She yearns from her back. She decides to be French. She begs like a dog.Her poems explore the lust, shame, and confessions of a melancholic young life with a style that recalls her mid-20th century precedents but lives here in the present, right alongside all of us contemporary wolves. Throughout this collection of new work, Francis negotiates her way through all the guilt and the giving up and the malady of youth, choosing through salvific poetic form, to instead, somehow, be well.