Wet Reckless

Victoria Lynne McCoy's debut collection of poetry, Wet Reckless, is part elegy to a friend who died too young, part guide to trying to live through unmistakable loss, part prayer for a way forward through grief, and part manual for opening your heart to the joy that still exists. From the opening poem which takes the reader on a ride of what ifs and maybes to the last poem where the speaker pulls herself from grief's hungry jaws, this collection doesn't let go. These poems speak to the grip loss and loneliness have on a heart, they speak to the guilt that weighs heavy on those who survive, and the fire of survival and hope that burns low within. These poems stoke the fires of grief while also keeping the embers of joy burning.

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Victoria Lynne McCoy's Wet Reckless is a gorgeous book that explores how tragedy can split a life in two and how "to be born girl is to enter the world already missing." Whether it's about girlhood and the way darkness can mark us or the coming of age in pain, these poems look-unflinchingly-at all the things that can be done to a body. Here, the speaker in poems learns home by leaving it and love by losing it, but we also see how origin stories are often a study in forgiveness. These poems are more than beautiful; they are wise. They see how we can struggle to tell the difference between a wound and a need; how the way to live without shame is a lifelong practice; how, despite everything, we must learn to crawl out of the mouth of grief and name our own way back from despair.

Traci Brimhall, author of The Grief Artist

Victoria Lynne McCoy's Wet Reckless is a disquietingly beautiful, guttural song of lamentation howled out from the caverns of grief. This stirring debut collection excavates grief's stony layers to find, in its center, the poet who "wear[s] survivor / like a still-burning brand." Guilt, shame, and toxic masculinity haunt as relentlessly as the dead in these profoundly contemplative, affecting poems of loss, of sorrow, of the living we do despite. "I lift my mouth to the cruel grace / of the living and drink," McCoy writes, her hard-fought wisdom so sincere we find ourselves following suit. Wet Reckless is, in this way, a shepherd, a path forward, a key to the locked door we make of ourselves in the depths of our despair.

Eugenia Leigh, author of Bianca