Today we’re thrilled to reveal the cover for Brenda S. Tolian’s debut poetry collection Bestial Mouths. The art was created by Chlo’e Camonayan, an illustrator and artist we met at this year’s StokerCon. Camonayan’s highly stylized and intricate art captures both the dark and savagely beautiful aspects of Tolian’s work.
PREORDER FOR $2 OFF • Coming November 14th
About the Book
Bestial mouths whisper, calling you into a labyrinth of nightmares, metamorphosis, and the liminal spaces of the beautiful grotesque lurking within the human psyche. Tolian’s debut poetry collection is an unequivocal battlecry for the exploited. Stripped of ornament, the language bites deep, revealing a suspended symbology of human and beast, intimacy and violence, life and death. This book bites deep, exploring themes of identity, metamorphosis, and the primal urge for survival, weaving through time, myth, and shifting perspectives.
The verses serve as a grimoire, an invocation, and a meditation on agency and autonomy over the body and soul—whether it is inherent, taken, sold, stolen, lost, reclaimed, or forcefully wrested back into the self. Sit down on the forest floor, dig your fingers into the soil, and open wide your bestial mouths, consume these words whispered in the darkness.
About the Artist
Born and raised in California, Chlo’e Camonayan is an L.A. based artist building her name in the creative community. Her publications include interior and exterior art for Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Helios Quarterly, Mermaid’s Monthly, The Haunted Traveler, Unfading Daydream and more. She is the Cover Artist for Pedro Iniguez’s Control Theory and fiction collection Synthetic Dawns & Crimson Dusks. Aside from being a published artist, she has created logos, graphic animations, and has had her paintings featured in the Chocolate and Art Show. During her down time she loves to spend time with her sweet Munchkin Cookie and her ninja turtle named Squirt. See more of her art on her website.