Sugar Fix - by Kory Wells (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

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

Review Quotes

I was seduced by the brilliant, lush work of Kory Wells, a poet who invites and desires a rich intimacy with her readers. Sugar Fix delves into that vibrant, humming intersection between the sacred and the sexual by examining the manifold desires of the body: hunger, pleasure, pain, and delight. Here, sugar serves as a vehicle for memory (both public and personal), sugar as birthplace, sugar as "spun honey and light." But the
poems also enter the darker, often forgotten parts of history and do so with grace and truth. There's nothing like a homemade dessert made with deep care and love. Each of these poems feels like a divine and delicious bite. --Tiana Clark, I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood

Kory Wells's words stun me every time I read them. Sugar Fix, celebrates the sweetest parts of life--the intimate // the tender, this sense / of you and me--even as it acknowledges the darker spectrum of desire: an earth hungry / for something we'd rather not name, a time when we all have crumbs at the / corners of our mouths, moist as galloping fear. Generous, moving, and deliciously accessible, these poems evoke a world of complex relationships and infinite possibility. Love is a kind of ruin, Wells writes, but this collection is ultimately a testimony to passion and connection. Even if you think you don't like poetry, one taste and you'll be endlessly craving Sugar Fix. --Jennie Fields, The Age of Desire