Publisher's Synopsis
Jessica Cato's chapbook, Through the Red Door's Open Maw, invites readers through the threshold into a liminal place where a hellish past blurs with present-day suburbia. These poems are a reckoning with the residual guilt and self-perception that haunts the bones-lineage, familial abandonment, addiction, mental illness, and queerphobia traced back to that red door, the open maw.
Cato reflects on love as foreign-comparing ancestries as if checking the past to see if there is anything innate in her familial bones, makeup, or core. In the poem, I'm Afraid Of Nice Kitchen Knives, she writes, "Is this what it's like to hold me? Something so sharp and grave?/How do you let your guard down around something like that?" Through the Red Door's Open Maw is a naked and honest reflection about what remains of one's past self and how to break free from beliefs of what is intrinsic to selfhood, to live beyond into goodness that need not be compared with personal history; instead, can shine all on its own. -Matthew Feinstein, author of Breeds of Breath beyondtheveilpress.comIG: @beyondtheveilpress
