Video Trailer for My New Book FLORALIA from Sundress Publications

3 days ago
1 min read

FLORALIA has been a long time in the works and I am deeply grateful to the team at Sundress Publications for rendering it so perfectly and making its publication easy. I could not be more pleased.

These pages of poetry represent years of research and personal work on the effects of sexual trauma on the mind and body as well as cultural responses to stories of sexual harm. Nothing I write is easy to engage, but we live in this world where people often make choices that do not honor our bodies and our hearts and I believe compassion springs from putting our own comfort aside, sitting with pain, and celebrating the resilience and grace it has required others to survive their stories if they will let us.

Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik and I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive, testifies to the difficulty and importance of these stories in FLORALIA with, “‘People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women,’ writes Kimberly Ann Priest in her expansive and often disquieting new collection FLORALIA. Her poems take risks in style and form that make them edgy and keen; and, despite the book’s difficult narrative of missing and exploited women, drug addiction, and the often-precarious struggle to survive, these risks make it a wonder to read. Presently, our culture is so anesthetized to violence that it’s easy to ignore or compartmentalize its terror and its hate. FLORALIA shakes us out of that complacency and demands we pay attention.”