Release Day: KNOCK

Release day is finally here and Knock is officially headed out into the world! You can purchase it directly from Half Mystic Press or on Amazon.

Truly, I have so many people to thank for their support throughout this process.

First and foremost, thank you to Topaz Winters and the rest of the Half Mystic team (Danie Shokoohi, Christina Im, Rebekah Markillie, etc.) for your dedication and passion. You’ve believed with me that this book has something to say and have worked tirelessly to help this book reach those who might need it.

Thank you to poetry heroes/friends Anthony Frame, Emari DiGiorgio, Stacey Balkun, and Cynthia Atkins for believing in and supporting this book and for taking the time to write magical, insightful blurbs.

Thank you to Porkbelly Press, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Storyscape Journal, A Bad Penny Review, Burnt Pine Review, Four Chambers Press, and Paper Nautilus for believing in and publishing previous versions of poems in this book.

A huge thank you to all of the bloggers who spent time with Knock over the past few weeks; you’ve written sparkling reviews, you’ve hosted giveaways, you’ve asked me fascinating questions, you’ve welcomed me into your spaces. I’ve been so humbled and grateful for the gift of your time and your insights.

Thank you as well to everyone who has read my poems and supported me along the way. Thank you to those who have preordered Knock and told others about the book. I truly hope that Knock can reach those struggling to give voice to the complexities of mental illness and gender and body.

And, as always, thank you to my dear friends and family: you are relentless in your love and encouragement.

Here are some snippets from the gorgeous reviews that Knock has received over the past two weeks:

At L’Ephemere Review, Kanika Lawton calls Knock “a breathless, uncomfortable, and important collection of poems on depression, womanhood, voices, and darkness, churning and pulsing with both pain and angry, unflinching hope.” These poems showcase “the body as transformation, the body as unstable testimony to pain” with a speaker who is “both detached and vividly clinging to the body.”

Knock is “a mouthpiece for the elegiac and illuminating,” according to Sneha Subramanian Kanta at Parentheses Journal. These poems are “articulate and vivid in their deft analysis of depression”; they are “unafraid in their vulnerability and rage to redefine constructs of gender”; they “feed the divine feminine.”

Beverley, at Word Drift, calls the book “haunting yet wildly mesmerizing” and “a relentless dialogue.” She says that the poems “whisked [her] into a world that hinted of something magical and otherworldly, yet was rooted in plumbing the depths of the human mind with all its urgency and melancholy.”

Over at The Coil, Margaryta Golovchenko says that “Knock is moving, melancholy, honest and above all: genuine.” Its “concerns and invocations are much larger than our limited, compartmentalized understanding of topics such as gender and love, surpassing these categories and speaking directly to the human soul” with language that is “simultaneously soft and biting.”

Utopia State of Mind says that “these poems pack a punch—in terms of imagery and vivid language” and that the collection is about a “desire to be heard, to be acknowledged. It’s almost like staring into the abyss, up to the stars, and waiting for them to remember us. Knock has this primordial imagery in it, a beauty in the circle of life, and in its destruction and savage curiosity.”

Amber, at YA Indulgences, calls Knock a “dark, magical sort of telling” where “metaphors and figurative language explode from the pages as it goes through depression, gender, and the deepest parts of ourselves.”

I’m also so grateful to have had the chance to participate in interviews with both Kanika Lawton, at L’Ephemere Review, and Christina Im, at the Half Mystic blog. They both asked such generous and insightful questions of the book.

Here’s an excerpt from my interview with Kanika:

Knock explores the complexity of mental illness through the use of disturbing and contrasting images. Severed tongues, creatures creeping out of darkened woods, and drowning, whether in water, blood, or the material, make their presence known throughout the book. Why employ such imagery, and what part did they play in your overall writing process?

… I want the reader to be disturbed, to question that is real, what could be real, to pay attention to who (and what) shapes the stories and truths we hear. I want us to pay heed to the darker realities, the undercurrents, the unpleasant truths that have been hidden and silenced.

And here’s one from my interview with Christina:

In the final part of the book, “v. to collide,” each poem’s title is a question to which the poem responds—a collision, so to speak, of two speakers. Why did you choose to explore that friction? Why at the end of the book?

…I’ve long been fascinated by the fact that what others hear is not necessarily what we say, and vice versa. I think, at least to some degree, speaking and listening always collide. Speech is an imperfect rendering of our thoughts; listening is an imperfect reception of speech. The question is what we do with that—how we can collide carefully and with compassion.

Knock has been a long time in the making, years of listening and writing and listening again. Thank you so much, friends, for answering the door.