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Gabrielle Joy Lessans's debut poetry collection Bread Of revisits buried and often mortifying memories of self-mutilation, emotional abuse, drug use, sexual assault, social pressure, and misery as a means of self-excavation. In this way, the autobiographical Bread Of is a multilayered processing of shame that feeds on itself when left untended. The book's vertical movement can be understood as a quest of sorts, a way of reckoning with and integrating a lost iteration of self. With tenderness and humor, Lessans invites us to share in a return that builds page by page--each centering a text that questions what a poem can be--into an unflinching exploration of what it means to occupy a body that simultaneously falls through and takes up space, a body that carries memory in its tissue, not only of lived experience, but also of an ancient and internal sense of Divinity.
About the author
Gabrielle Lessans is an experimental poet whose writing orients toward the hearth where deep play & healing most intersect. She lives in Denver, Colorado with her husband, dog & two cats, leading weekly writing workshops, teaching yoga, and co-collaborating with Nocturne School of Lucid Writing and collective.off. She received her BA in Literature from Duke University and her MFA from Naropa's Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, where she worked with the poetics of friendship, trauma and memory. Gabrielle was named a finalist for the Nightboat Poetry Prize in 2017 & 2018 for her collection [a go]. Recent work can be found in Black Sun Lit: Vestiges 4, Inverted Syntax, Dream Pop, Bone Bouquet. This is her first book.
