Little Beast

Little Beast is a collection of poems that remind us that brutality and beauty are often two sides of the same coin. Does love exist without savagery? What is the difference between motherhood and miracles? Wildlife, witchcraft, and wonder are found throughout these poems, and each pull the reader into the magic they hold. Weaving folklore with survival stories, this collection informs the reader when to fight back, when to run, and when to trust shelter when it’s finally found.

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Sara Quinn Rivara’s dazzling new collection Little Beast is the fire and the cauldron. These poems “unzip [their] woman’s skin.” In language at once precise and ferocious, these poems sizzle and writhe, and yet they rise, anew, clean of every abuse, every patriarchal gaslight that sparked their death, their rebirth. They are housewitches and snaked, smart, double-edged women—Eve and her progeny disavowing the gardens and wilding their own. Taut, tightwire, sharp, and utterly gorgeous, these poems mother themselves and a whole new generation of powerful girls and women with “a kind of hope that borders on the obscene.” These little beasts unleash the feral spells within us all.

~ Jenn Givhan, author of Belly to the Brutal

In the poem “Witch-wife,” Sara Quinn Rivara writes, “This is a woman’s story. You know how it ends.” But we don’t. Rivara deconstructs and reconstructs mythology, fairy tale, allegory, and history, turning each tale upon its head. In “At The Far Edge of Paradise,” while “Adam named the animals, [. . . ] Eve swallowed their names like pomegranate seeds before she slipped into the underworld.” I kept reading and rereading to untangle each poem, to learn what would happen next, to delight in each retelling, to follow the string through the labyrinth, which is really a tapestry of Rivara’s making. I know I’ll come back to this collection again and again.

~ Shaindel Beers, author of Secure Your Own Mask (Winner of the White Pine Poetry Prize, Finalist for the Oregon Book Award)