Publisher's Synopsis
"Velvet Hounds, winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize, is a completely combustible collection of poetry. In extravagant, shape-shifting imagery and mythic-meets-black-leather vernacular, Seu takes readers on a journey through reckless youth, first love, addiction, bliss, agony and mayhem. Velvet Hounds is a semi-autobiographical collection bearing reckless witness, with nothing held back, to the wreckage bulimia nervosa makes of a body and spirit as well as the pain and personal schisms from which such a disorder might stem. In Velvet Hounds, Seu also delves into the difficulties of growing up the biracial, pansexual, wayfaring child of a deceased pastor and fundamentalist Christian writer mother. The book chronicles the effects of her mother's and her own wavering mental health and through that lens, the incoherent and dangerous labyrinth two people's psychosis can create when they collide. From impassioned, ecstatic, abstracted odes l
