Just Published: Sugar Fix, by Kory Wells
Congratulations to Kory on the feature of her poem Voice on Tracy K. Smith's The Slowdown podcast series, January 10, 2020.
Praise for Sugar Fix
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
Praise for Sugar Fix
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
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Kory Wells is a poet, writer, storyteller, and advocate for the arts. She is the author of Heaven Was the Moon, a poetry chapbook from March Street Press. In 2017 she was selected the inaugural Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a position she continues to hold. She founded and manages a reading and open mic series in Murfreesboro. Her work has appeared in numerous online and print publications, including the James Dickey Review, Ruminate, Stirring, and The Southern Poetry Anthology. Winner of the 2016 HeartWood Broadside Series and a two-time finalist for the Rash Award for Poetry, she is also a mentor with the low-residency program MTSU Write. Sugar Fix is her debut full-length collection.
korywells.com Available at Amazon B&N Terrapin Bookstore |