The Uninhabitable

“In the lush and dream-like world of Jesse Rice-Evan's The Uninhabitable, the conventional narrative of the body gives way to a more porous landscape where pain becomes a stream, fur, fang, mammal, blossom, anemone and sting. The otherworldly quality of this book's language is by no means an escape from the ableist reality in which the body lives but rather a means to renegotiate a life through the terms of queer femme excess, of brimming and spilling over what may appear fixed and confined in meaning and experience. With linguistic vibrancy, this book revels in this gorgeous abundance, enacting a molting that reveals in every new form the capaciousness of what we know to be the body's many lives.” - Muriel Leung, author of Bone Confetti

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“Jesse Rice-Evan’s The Uninhabitable contains the paradox of its name with the same solipsistic fury and delivery as the late Tory Dent’s HIV, Mon Amour. Where Dent wrote of quarantines, Rice-Evans writes of that which has already ramshackled. In The Uninhabitable, strength happens through inverse, in the silence of a propranolol-numb lower lip, in the taut breast skin cramping the solar plexus, in the cane’s balancing act of coffeehouse dishware. Rice-Evan’s selves split apart from their most basic grammars, as when she writes, ‘The way I save myself and leave my self behind.’ While we might be tempted to see the self in odyssey, Rice-Evans volunteers her own cornering. In these poems, we do not get a poet at peace with or empowered by her pain. Instead, the interior she privileges is ‘the wrongness of a body growing content to sting.’ These poems give us the gambit of that pain, her pain’s keen inability to forget or forgive, her pain’s queering lexicons. She sings, ‘Who knew how weird I were’ and we move to her discordant music. This is a powerful, dismantling debut.” Natalie Eilbert, author of Indictus

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“I love Leo poets. I do. A passion so expansive. ‘My mouth, your mouth, kissing on the sidewalk, swapping fang for fang.’ A passion so open. ‘I am pumped full of stuff: toughness, tender spots (like a little flicker in my heart), vessels of...’. A passion capable of immense pain. ‘My body is not under attack from anyone but myself.’ A passion capable of huge, expansive vulnerability. ‘Everybody needs me but no one will keep me’ Here, in Jesse Rice-Evans’ The Uninhabitable, I see feeling that is just so textured and present and giving. Honestly, it makes me weep. Honestly, it makes me know why I read. A friend texted me today and said we are often surrounded by boring writers. I think she’s right!!! But I think we are NOT surrounded by boring writers, too. And I think writers like Jesse Rice-Evans create space for us to write as we are.” -Carrie Lorig, author of The Pulp vs. The Throne.