Monster Galaxy

Cindy Veach's Monster Galaxy is a beautiful collection buzzing with memory monsters, tender girlhood, haunting grief, and startling selves. These poems are viscerally felt, with images that linger in vivid synesthesia: "They spit stars in my face when I open their shells." Woven with vulnerability, Veach's poems move through haibuns, self-portraits, myths, and epistolaries, asking us to look under our beds for the monsters and burying beetles within and around us.

-Jane Wong, author of How to Not Be Afraid of Everything

Monster Galaxy is a tour de force of negative capability. Like life itself, Veach braids grief, anger, and beauty, often in a single poem. From Alan Ginsberg taking a nap in the speaker's childhood room before a poetry reading to the Challenger crashing through the sky as the pregnant speaker drives to a doctor's appointment, this intimate collection grapples with profound issues especially misogyny-systemic and internalized-and how it warps one's self-image, damages desire and perpetuates shame. "I Think I was a Good Daughter" ends with a surprise question directly to the reader. "I was alone as a cornered spider. // Why am I telling you this?" Perhaps Veach crafts these incandescent poems to be less alone. The why is not as important as the fact that we are the fortunate recipients of this masterful work.

-Jennifer Franklin, author of If Some God Shakes Your House

Monster Galaxy spins new galaxies as it catalogues, explores, and explodes the mythologies, wonderments, puzzles, and contradictions of the current world at hand. The deconstruction of story creates new possibilities for what it means to inhabit a body and what it means to connect to the parts of ourselves that want that body's narrative to be more interesting. The poet is one who dares to look at her own Medea-mirror...and live to tell the intricate stories of our internal landscapes that have been waiting for this guide.

-Jennifer Oakes, author of We Can't Tell If the Constellations Love Us