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In this debut collection, Isabella Preisz explores what it means to exist in simultaneity. Across these visceral poems, Preisz recreates moments of adolescence, sexual exploration, shame, and disassociation to examine what it means to occupy the body after violation. She fragments language to display healing as a conglomerate experience of past, present, and future remembrance. Catching language on the boundary of formation, she exposes the process of recovery as fluid as egg yolk — gooey, runny, and easily ruptured.
About the author
Isabella Preisz enjoys spaghetti, Danish summers, and poetry in the bathtub. She explores the topics of identity, sexuality, & shame. In 2016, she self-published her first book, 7,300 days, which has sold more than 10,000 copies worldwide. As a graduate from the University of Southern California, she was the recipient of the 2019 University of Edinburgh Fellowship, Jimmy Gaunt Memorial Award, and the Gene and Etta Silverman Award.
Summary
In this debut collection, Isabella Preisz explores what it means to exist in simultaneity. Across these visceral poems, Preisz recreates moments of adolescence, sexual exploration, shame, and disassociation to examine what it means to occupy the body after violation. She fragments language to display healing as a conglomerate experience of past, present, and future remembrance. Catching language on the boundary of formation, she exposes the process of recovery as fluid as egg yolk — gooey, runny, and easily ruptured.
Additional text
"This book creates its own atmosphere. Isabella doesn't write 'about' the experience of disembodiment, but rather speaks directly from within the healing process. The poems don't stand away from trauma at a safe distance for detached commentary, nor are they anxious to explain themselves, why they dare take up space and attention. Lucid and fluid, this narrator melts between innocence and knowledge and back again, troubling the waters. You feel as though you're listening to the noises behind her wall, sensual in every sense of the word, or that there was never a wall in the first place. 'I was the open / door with no hinges or knobs / or frame'. Come in." —Rhiannon McGavin
