The Places We Empty

More about the book

"In Julie Weiss’s poems, the speaker is haunted by “the apocalypse that threatens / to sweep across my imagination.” Her poems are filled with people living in an epidemic-ravaged world, people who are disappearing, escaping, searching, desiring, loving. It’s a world where women’s bodies, queer bodies, black and brown bodies, are disciplined and punished. “We’re lucky to be alive,” she says, the irony of such “luck” weighing heavy on the page. And yet “alive” these poems are, crying out with powerfully beautiful language. For as the book’s opening epigraph reminds us, wisdom is found in the shadows" -- cover page