Terrapin Books Sugar fix, paperback/kory wells

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The subjects of poetry are the same: love and loss, sex and death and grief, family in all its permutations and complications.

The differences are in the telling, and Kory Wells is a powerful teller.

Her poems are as layered and dense as her grandmother's Red Velvet cake.

What is it, she asks, that makes us want to swallow // a story whole? To think // only one version can be true? With a clear eye, she confronts the paradoxes that gender, race, and heritage present.

She writes from a rootedness in her homeland that reaches down generations.

She writes as a citizen of this troubled world: I'm unlearning the urge for a sugar fix like I'm unlearning // my threshold for what is acceptable, terrible, commonplace.

// Tell me I don't have to unlearn hope.

She does what we ask of the poet.

All that we ask.

--Marie Harris, former New Hampshire Poet Laureate.