We’re excited to announce that there will be several new formats for this year’s Bram Stoker-winning poetry collection by Stephanie M. Wytovich. An audiobook edition will be coming soon, as well as paperback and ebook formats.
This collection was a big departure in style for Wytovich we originally decided a hardcover-only release with illustrations was the best way to present the book. However, the book’s popularity continues to grow and later this month a poem from the collection will be featured in Washington Post book critic Ron Charles’ Book Club newsletter. Due to all this interest we wanted to make sure that more affordable editions of the book are available. However, the hardcover will remain the only edition with illustrations.
You can preorder the ebook edition here.
Preorder the paperback here.
About the Book
Welcome to the garden. Here we poison our fruits, pierce ourselves with thorns, and transform under the light of the full moon. Mad and unhinged, we fall through rabbit holes, walk willingly into fairy rings, and dance in the song of witchcraft, two snakes around our ankles, the juice of berries on our tongues.
Inspired by Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, these poems are meditations on female rage, postpartum depression, compulsion, and intrusive thoughts. They pull from periods of sleep deprivation, soul exhaustion, and nightmarish delusions, and each is left untitled, a nod to the stream-of-conscious mind of a new mother.
Using found poetry and under the influence of bibliomancy, Wytovich harnesses the occult power of her imagery and words and aligns it with a new, more vulnerable, darkness. These pieces are not only visions of the madwoman in the attic, but ghostly visitations that explore the raw mental torture women sometimes experience after giving birth.
This collection heals as much as it scars, and is an honest look at how trauma seeps into the soil of our bodies. Her poems are imagined horrors, fictional fears, and all the unspoken murmurs of a mind lost between reality and dream. What she leaves in her wake is nothing short of horror—the children lost, the garden dead, the women feral, ready to pounce.