The Mothercake Cycle

I have a new fantasy of becoming: to be absorbed in mothercake in whose queer ecology Kolby Harvey has rendered a (de)generative new science fiction and fact where each sentence throbs its glorious purple obscenity. - Tim Jones-Yelvington author of Strike a Prose: Memoirs of a Lit Diva Extraordinaire and This is a Dance Movie!__What happens when a book insists on a system of naming that refuses pronoun language that decenters the subject and a grammar that defamiliarizes the world? Kolby Harveys wildly inventive playfully surreal Mothercake Cycle--a fierce funny and strange little book of collages that evade while they insist on a radical queer embodiment. The mothercake--the discarded organ that feeds the fetus the sponge that filters the toxins from the past body into the future body the animal afterbirth from a second labor--is at once an absurd character and a powerful metaphor for queer estrangement dysmorphia and disidentification. Pulling language from fairy tales video games and Designing Women the mothercake like a placenta protecting the vulnerable queer child within while absorbing a toxic culture is a drag persona an avatar where a cord connects us to a tender thing. - Vanessa Angélica Villarreal author of Beast Meridian