“The irony of Kelly Weber’s brilliant first book of poetry is how sexy each sentence feels pressed to tongue. This is a book obsessed with sound, with the haunting creak of animals breaking through human bodies, canter and flight. Sex is everywhere in this book, and romance, too. And yet the lived experience Weber captures is Aroace Girl, aromantic and asexual, attached to the natural world but refusing expected couplings. She slithers, untethered; she claws, shoots, bleeds in a landscape described with such heartbreakingly beautiful precision that we’re forced to question what sex is, anyway. What is a body without another body pressed against it, inside it, stealing its dreams? Who is this Aroace Girl who stands so confidently in the sights of the hunter, knowing she doesn’t need anything in her mouth but words, anything between her legs but an arrow she shoots from her thighs? She’s magic. This book is stunning, like nothing else, and so sure of its experience that it won’t be bullied or twisted into submitting to norms: of hetero, of couple, of labor. Every poem feels original, unsettling, starkly refusing to bend to the cishet world’s will. I listened to the body in wonder. I let words escape me again and again.”
—Carol Guess, author of Girl Zoo and Doll Studies: Forensics

“The staggering beauty of these poems lies in their ability to re-envision what the body, & a life, might be capable of. Weber deftly transforms experience into landscapes that the speaker can daughter, even desperately, as sky or a deer or struck iron, to be visible. The poems give shape and form to the concerns of asexuality and aromanticism, ‘concluding asexuality is not a disorder / but a distinct orientation,’ as the speaker asks in different ways over the course of the collection, ‘how can I want / my skeleton to hold you / with softness I don’t have.’ The movement from ‘the entrance of the body’ to ‘beautiful’ might be perilous, yet it proves worthwhile, as is entering this stunning book, ‘headwatered in these bodies of ours,’ where to enter means to allow language to translate dying into living into ‘a river too full to contain all this sky.’”
—Chelsea Dingman, author of Through a Small Ghost and Thaw