Velvet Hounds: poems

by Aimee Seu

Overview

Winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize

Can be used as a course adoption for courses such as courses on female, queer or biracial writers, courses on erotic writing, courses on mixed-genre writing, body writing / eating disorder writing, Poetics of Feminism 

Events and book signings will likely be at Florida State University and Temple University

Those interested in poetry about eating disorders and mental health issues

Those interested in poetry by Asian American writers and LGBTQ+ writers

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781629222219
Publisher:	University of Akron Press, The
Publication date:	03/02/2022
Series:	Akron Series in Poetry
Pages:	73
Sales rank:	1,163,651
Product dimensions:	6.06(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.47(d)

About the Author

Aimee Seu is the author of Velvet Hounds, winner of The Akron Poetry Prize. She graduated from the University of Virginia Creative Writing MFA Poetry Program in 2020 as a Poe/Faulkner Fellow where she was recipient of the 2019 Academy of American Poets Prize. Other awards she’s received include the 2020 Los Angeles Review Poetry Award, the 2020 Henfield Prize for Fiction, the 2016 Academy of American Poets Prize at Temple University, the Temple University 2016 William Van Wert Award, and the Mills College Undergraduate Poetry Award. She was a semifinalist in the 2019 New Guard Vol. IX Knightville Poetry Contest judged by Richard Blanco and a finalist for the 2020 Black Warrior Poetry Prize judged by Paul Tran. Her poetry, fiction and nonfiction have appeared or have forthcoming publications in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Los Angeles Review, BOAAT, Redivider, Raleigh Review, Diode, Minnesota Review, Blacklist, Adroit, Harpur Palate, and Runestone Magazine. She is a Philadelphia native currently living in Tallahassee where she is a Poetry PhD student at Florida State University.

Table of Contents

Poison Ivy Handjob 1

Part I

Family Portrait with Cadillac Engulfed in Flames 7

17 10

The Warning 11

July 13

Clitoral 14

Portrait of Boy Preserved in Chlorine 16

You Say I Look Happy in a Photograph from When We Were Apart and I Think 18

Nikki Lyn 20

First Love 23

Love Letter to Myself at Sixteen 25

The World 27

G-Spot 30

Postlapsarian 31

Heaven 32

Part II

Thrift Store Fur 35

OX Hunger Essay 37

Nightly Detonation 42

The Bulimic Soul Says to the Bulimic Body 44

Dark Spring 45

January Relapse 46

Young 48

Cape May Church Retreat: Thirteen 50

Lobby of the Philadelphia Animal Shelter 51

Telling Your Best Friend 52

Part III

First Memory 57

Long Lonely 58

Part IV

The Kittens 67

My Love 68

My Love 69

On Recovery 71

Homage 73

7 A.M., Philly, 31°F 74

Theremin 78

Morning Phantom 80

Surfer 81

Long Distance 83

Wider Than a Mile 85

Thanksgiving 88

Ode to Pomegranates 90

Imaginary Dream 92

Aubade XV 95

Epilogue

In Flux: 25 99

Acknowledgments 102

Editorial Reviews

Reader, be warned. Aimee Seu has formed a band called Poison Ivy Handjob and you are both in it and riding the rail in her heart’s big and generously gifted room. Prepare to be hounded by desire, to chase the G-spot of beauty, and to ache with sympathetic longing as you move through poems irresistibly vibrant and vibrating with layered synths of the gothic, the sexy, the risky, and the unflinchingly gorgeous wonderland of the world.

Lisa Russ Spaar

Poetic descendant of Sappho, Sexton, and Plath, Aimee Seu grabs the page by its white lapels and doesn’t let go until it’s memorized her, mesmerized by her fiery vulnerability, her bold candor. To read Velvet Hounds is to wriggle oneself through the narrow tunnel not to being John Malkovich, but to being a young woman trying to give birth to herself. Poem by poem, she does. You think it is hell at times, that dark close place, but no, as she writes in “G-Spot,” it’s the “country beyond language, compelled / as the tide, such lunacy / & unbearable gush.” This is the sound of a poet taking ownership of her life, line by line. Gutting and lovely, these poems wrestle with unfaithful unknowable preacher fathers and troubled mothers, wrenching hungry addictions, the anarchy of desire. Velvet Hounds is an earthquake of a book. Bone-rattled by desires, these poems seek love. They seek love, not just the “chandelier / made of frozen rain,” not just inside the “marvelous, decadent palace” of the body—but the sort of love that homes us, page by page, a home that could “outstay us our own bodies.

American writer (poet Philip Metres 

Velvet Hounds rockets us back to adolescence, and to the bodies that ferried us through it. With equal parts rosewater and lighter fluid, Seu mixes us a stiff drink that eats us out from the inside as it goes down. Its language is heady in the throat, a carnivore on the tongue, fragile and lush on the lip. Here, the body is beast and best-beloved, weapon and shield, scapegoat and loyal dog. Here, we are reminded of what gets lost, what lasts, and what we—at long last—come home to.

Claire Wahmanholm