Here Go the Knives
Here Go the Knives is Kelsey Bryan-Zwick debut book. A collection of poems and illustrations that depict their decades navigating the treacherous realities of the disabled life. Words wrought in the forge of spine surgery, each image glitters with life and blood. Poems that extend the delicate reach from skin to spine, marrow to meaning, poems that have secrets to whisper from page to reader.
In advanced praise of Here Go the Knives:
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Here Go the Knives is an astonishing debut, startling in its verve and tenacity, aching in its vulnerability and tenderness. Just as the poet “offers [their] broken body, time and time again upon the operating table,” Kelsey Bryan-Zwick offers to the reader an intimate glimpse into their lifetime of experience living with scoliosis—the scars, the weeping, the pain made beautiful through the alchemy of language. Sometimes a whispering, sometimes a howling thing, this is a gorgeous collection from a fiercely gentle poet whose “heart…takes a thousand arrows” and still carries on singing, inviting the reader to celebrate the miracle of life alongside them.
—Nancy Lynée Woo, Poet & Community Organizer
With bravery and vulnerability, Bryan-Zwick invites us inside their body – the cruel, tough body and the soft, loving body. They take us on a journey we won’t soon forget. Their frank and honest poems leave wide imprints, filling us with hope. We ride along for the pain in the lines, synced to the melody of sweet, tender empowerment. Through Here Go the Knives, I, too, explored my embodied self, concluding “this body worth its weight and / worthwhile, gold and golden.”
—karo ska, author of loving my salt-drenched bones
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Indeed, Here Go the Knives has been years in the making, poem by poem, and word by word, and now she (yes I call my book a she) is ready to meet you. And we, yes my book and I, are so happy to have a home at Moon Tide Press, who is publishing these books into life this March of 2022! Indeed it is my extreme pleasure to invite yo to pre-order, Here Go the Knives, now to secure a signed copy as well as free shipping within the US.
Bone Water
This microchapbook is part of Blanket Sea Press’ 2021 Awareness & Advocacy series. A portion of Blanket Sea’s proceeds will be donated to The Breonna Taylor Memorial Scholarship, which honors its namesake by providing annual support to a black woman seeking a degree in nursing.
Advanced Praise
"In the dedication, Kelsey writes, 'to my scoliosis, chronic, and spoonie family–', which seems a small declaration until the reader falls into the chapbook’s body and its shifting parts. It is the 'bouffant cap' adorning the request: 'promise that you are not yet preserves in formaldehyde.' It is this awareness of how there is no single body, but instead the unavoidable reality of it being its parts, and how those parts can betray us, open us without permission: 'But even after/they sewed me up I kept on leaking.' This leaking across and the parts haunting themselves echo back in their reading voice as they elongate the vowels, falling into cadence. There is a second haunting that emerges – those who have lived with chronic-pain conditions, who operate in crip time with crip senses, will recognize how pain vibrates its own particular sounds, even 'sharpening the noise like knives.' So, I join their welcoming dedication: it is, in fact, to us, and the haunting will be welcome respite for readers needing some time away from a world that insists the body is whole, must be whole, stays whole and aligned."
—C.R. Grimmer, author of The Lyme Letters
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Bryan-Zwick offers a body in verse, giving voice to so many others in pain yearning to be seen, and giving non-disabled readers a glimpse of a spoonie’s pain that they otherwise wouldn’t acknowledge or understand.”
—Tamara Hattis, author of Colors of My Pain
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“Reading Bone Water, I remember the C.S. Lewis dictum: ‘We read to know we are not alone.’ I am thankful for brave poets like Kelsey Bryan-Zwick whose work offers companionship in pain: ‘I imagine a microphone/ I imagine/ I imagine I am talking to you.’
—Donna Hilbert, Gravity: New & Selected Poems
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Watermarked
Watermarked (Sadie Girl Press), published in 2015 in a limited handbound edition. Printed in full color this chapbook combines Kelsey's vivid natural art and her poems. Ricki Mandeville (author of A Thin Strand of Light) glows, "To read Kelsey Bryan-Zwick’s poems is to step aboard a bullet train, put on the poet’s kaleidoscope glasses, and see her images flashing by like countryside outside the train windows."
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Out of print.
Watches Synchronized To Awestruck
Watches Synchronized to Awestruck was published in 2014 under Kelsey's DIY bookbinding label BindYourOwnBooks. In it are many of the poems written during her time in Write Bloody Publishing's Dirty Dozen Poetry Workshop taught by Derrick C. Brown. They are careful, tender poems, that begin to mend the trauma.
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Out of print.
bark
bark was written and self-published in 2009 as part of Kelsey's graduating thesis from UC Santa Cruz where she earned her B.A. in Literature/Creative Writing-Poetry. Under the guidance of Gary Young, the 40 copies where each made with individually painted covers cut from a series of paintings she made to evoke the little treasures found on a hike: the special leaf, the round stone, the rough and musky piece of bark.
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Out of print.