{"id":5807,"date":"2022-03-02T08:45:49","date_gmt":"2022-03-02T13:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?post_type=product&p=5807"},"modified":"2024-09-26T10:22:02","modified_gmt":"2024-09-26T14:22:02","slug":"velvet-hounds","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/velvet-hounds\/","title":{"rendered":"Velvet Hounds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Velvet Hounds<\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0is a completely combustible collection of poetry. In extravagant, shape-shifting imagery and mythic-meets-black-leather vernacular, Seu takes readers on a journey through reckless youth, first love, addiction, bliss, agony and mayhem.\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Velvet Hounds<\/span><\/span><\/em>\u00a0is a semi-autobiographical collection bearing reckless witness, with nothing held back, to the wreckage bulimia nervosa makes of a body and spirit as well as the pain and personal schisms from which such a disorder might stem. In\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Velvet Hounds<\/em>,<\/span><\/span>\u00a0Seu also delves into the difficulties of growing up the biracial, pansexual, wayfaring child of a deceased pastor and fundamentalist Christian writer mother. The book chronicles the effects of her mother\u2019s and her own wavering mental health and through that lens, the incoherent and dangerous labyrinth two people\u2019s psychosis can create when they collide. From impassioned, ecstatic, abstracted odes like\u00a0<\/span><\/span>G-Spot<\/span><\/span>, \u201cstrongroom, throne room of baritone ache\u201d &\u00a0<\/span><\/span>Clitoral<\/span><\/span>\u00a0\u201cSinewed capsule \/ of holy spirit. My body, \/ the electric chair \/ berserk.\u201d To the clarity and searing vulnerability of narrative sequences like the long poem \u201cOx Hunger Essay\u201d which chronicles different thresholds in the narrators struggle with death, betrayal, bulimia, and the isolation of identity \u201cI developed a habit of wringing \/ my stomach out in my throat.\u201d Never shying away from the erotic, visceral, nightmarish or any juiced-up phantasmagorical earthly heaven, Velvet Hounds<\/em> is a thunderstorm you\u2019ll lose yourself inside.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

About the Author<\/h3>\n

Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds<\/em>, winner of\u00a0The Akron\u00a0Poetry Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia Creative Writing MFA Poetry Program in 2020 as a Poe\/Faulkner Fellow where she was recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Other awards she\u2019s received include the 2020 Los Angeles Review Poetry Award, the 2020 Henfield Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize at Temple University, the Temple University 2016 William Van Wert Award, and the Mills College Undergraduate Poetry Award. She was a semifinalist in the 2019 New Guard Vol. IX\u00a0Knightville\u00a0Poetry Contest judged by Richard Blanco and a finalist for the 2020 Black Warrior Poetry Prize judged by Paul Tran. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared or have forthcoming publications in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Los Angeles Review, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Minnesota Review, Blacklist, Adroit, Harpur Palate, <\/em>and Runestone Magazine<\/em>. She is a Philadelphia native currently living in Tallahassee where she is a Poetry PhD student at Florida State University.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Advanced praise for\u00a0Velvet Hounds<\/em><\/h3>\n

Poetic descendant of Sappho, Sexton, and Plath, Aimee\u202fSeu\u202fgrabs the page by its white lapels and doesn\u2019t let go until it\u2019s memorized her, mesmerized by her fiery vulnerability, her bold candor. To read\u202f<\/span>Velvet Hounds<\/span><\/i>\u202fis to wriggle oneself through the narrow tunnel not to being John Malkovich, but to\u202fbeing\u202fa young woman trying to give birth to herself. Poem by poem, she does. You think it is hell at times, that dark close place, but no, as she writes in \u201cG-Spot,\u201d it\u2019s the \u201ccountry beyond language, compelled \/ as the tide, such lunacy \/ & unbearable gush.\u201d This is the sound of a poet taking ownership of her life, line by line. Gutting and lovely, these poems wrestle with unfaithful unknowable preacher fathers and troubled mothers, wrenching hungry addictions, the anarchy of desire.\u202f<\/span>Velvet Hounds<\/span><\/i>\u202fis an earthquake of a book. Bone-rattled by desires, these poems seek love. They seek love, not just the \u201cchandelier \/ made of frozen rain,\u201d not just inside the \u201cmarvelous, decadent palace\u201d of the body\u2014but the sort of love that homes us, page by page, a home that could \u201coutstay us our own bodies.\u201d
\n\u2014Philip\u202fMetres\u202f<\/strong><\/span>\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Velvet Hounds<\/span><\/i>\u00a0rockets us back to adolescence, and to the bodies that ferried us through it. With equal parts rosewater and lighter fluid, Seu mixes us a stiff drink that eats us out from the inside as it goes down. Its language is heady in the throat, a carnivore on the tongue, fragile and lush on the lip. Here, the body is beast and best-beloved, weapon and shield, scapegoat and loyal dog. Here, we are reminded of what gets lost, what lasts, and what we\u2014at long last\u2014come home to.<\/span>
\n<\/span>\u2014Claire Wahmanholm\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reader, be warned.\u00a0 Aimee Seu has formed a band called Poison Ivy\u00a0Handjob\u00a0and you are both in it and riding the rail in her heart\u2019s big and generously gifted room.\u00a0 Prepare to be hounded by desire, to chase the G-spot of beauty, and to ache with sympathetic longing as you move through poems irresistibly vibrant and vibrating with layered synths of the gothic, the sexy, the risky, and the unflinchingly gorgeous wonderland of the world.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>
\n\u2014Lisa Russ Spaar\u00a0<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Velvet Hounds<\/em>\u00a0opens with a punk band and closes with an aubade, and Aimee Seu too is raucous and romantic, brutal and rueful, audacious and vulnerable, and never less than intense. Gothic as Plath, her talent is full-on, headstrong, and clit-smart, everywhere informed by embodied experience. Her pansexual erotic panegyrics and recollections of bulimia are frank about sex, love, and self-harm, and how they all lead back to a childhood survived through the driving power of desire. \u201cPleasure\u00a0should<\/em>\u00a0be messy,\u201d Seu argues, each of her poems \u201cRenegade red & ambrosian as swearing.\u201d
\n\u2014Brian Teare<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviews<\/h3>\n

On the Seawall<\/a><\/p>\n

Eight Bridge Press<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Aimee Seu<\/h4>\n

Winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize<\/p>\n

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