The Places We Empty

In Julie Weiss's poems, the speaker is haunted by "the apocalypse that threatens / to sweep across my imagination." Her poems are filled with people living in an epidemic-ravaged world, people who are disappearing, escaping, searching, desiring, loving. It's a world where women's bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies, are disciplined and punished. "We're lucky to be alive," she says, the irony of such "luck" weighing heavy on the page. And yet "alive" these poems are, crying out with powerfully beautiful language. For as the book's opening epigraph reminds us, wisdom is found in the shadows.

Kate Evans, author of Call It Wonder and Target

In this searing collection, Weiss asks "What good is poetry when all it can do is kneel on a piece of paper and wail?" Her poems push hard against this question, giving voice and depth to the darkest places embodied in each of us, in our history, and in our culture. These poems are a reckoning. They exhume and sing griefs and traumas with such skill that they are both moan and a call to action, slicing into the reader "like an elegant blade." Time and again, with wisdom and beauty, Weiss proves that poetry is more than kneeling-it is the gift of attention, a form of allyship, and a space for those who have been silenced, displaced, or fractured. These poems are also a reminder to love, even more wildly, when what is laid out before us might be beyond repair.

Megan Merchant, author of Before the Fevered Snow (Stillhouse Press, 2020)

In Julie Weiss's intimate and powerful debut collection, she asks us in a myriad of ways, "what good is poetry?" Her poems provide an answer in the evocation of the unnamable and tender places of pain, suffering, and death that mark our human lives. Her words nourish and fill us again and again.

Persis Karim, poet and editor of Let Me Tell You Where I've Been: New Writing by Women of the Iranian Diaspora