Description: We Were More than Kindling follows the speaker's reckoning of an intimate history of persistent sexualization and consent violation with the disillusion of coming of age in an era when abuse of power is a feature, not a bug. This collection of poems builds momentum through a cynical premise, following its speaker's defiant claim-staking over their own body, agency, and pleasure.
Review Quotes:
"'A few hours before I ran into my rapist / at Whole Foods, ' the adverbial clause that opens Jessica Morey-Collins' WE WERE MORE THAN KINDLING, immediately places the reader in a world where the horrific and the quotidian intersect. These poems consider human consciousness, our capacity for destruction and love, and nature through a metaphysical lens; the eco-poetics and feminism of the manuscript are inextricable from the personal lyric. Through elision, interrupted syntax, and doubling, the writing demonstrates the inadequacy of language and conveys the complexity of human experience. Lyric and rhetorical, this vital collection reflects the flux and agony of our time, for 'to grow is to access a flow state from grieving, to blow each moment like a fuse.' I look forward to reading Jessica Morey-Collins for the rest of my life."
--Carolyn Hembree, author of Skinny, and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague
"The poems of WE WERE MORE THAN KINDLING by Jessica Morey-Collins bring us characters with uncanny awareness of their place in the universe, whether battling hostile weather, interacting with plants, animals, and bodies of water, or recounting the perils of lived trauma. In 'Passage, ' the speaker remarks, 'Amazing the way a tiny wound, precisely placed, can devastate. Who hasn't aspired to a thicker skin?' These poems triumph in their ability to convey pain without flinching, sharing testimony of natural disaster and human violence, ultimately leaving us emboldened and aware."
--Mary Biddinger, author of Department of Elegy