Bread Of

<p><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Gabrielle Joy Lessans's debut poetry collection </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Bread Of</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> revisits buried and often mortifying memories of self-mutilation emotional abuse drug use sexual assault social pressure and misery as a means of self-excavation. In this way the autobiographical </span><em style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)>Bread Of</em><span style=color: rgba(0 0 0 1)> is a multilayered processing of shame that feeds on itself when left untended. The book's vertical movement can be understood as a quest of sorts a way of reckoning with and integrating a lost iteration of self. With tenderness and humor Lessans invites us to share in a return that builds page by page--each centering a text that questions what a poem can be--into an unflinching exploration of what it means to occupy a body that simultaneously falls through and takes up space a body that carries memory in its tissue not only of lived experience but also of an ancient and internal sense of Divinity. </span></p><p><br></p>