Publisher Description

Haunted by on-line confessions, ranging from the trivial to the homicidal, and by a society obsessed with people changing their corporeal forms, Fleshgraphs is a multi-vocal manifesto of the body. Lyrical, experimental, satirical-these prose fragments enact a potent exploration of queerness, girlhood and illness against a backdrop of internet and rape culture.

Author Biography

BRYNNE REBELE-HENRY was born in 1999. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, The Volta, So to Speak, Verse, and Adroit, among other publications. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

Review

"A visceral engagement with the politics and poetics of girlhood by a 14-year-old author, these lyrical experimental, satirical prose fragments enact a potent exploration of queerness, girlhood, and illness against a backdrop of Internet and rape culture."—Publishers Weekly"Grasping one's sense of selfhood is dependent on the selves around us and the way we project ourselves on other human beings, consciously or not. These other beings may also constitute themselves as mirrors that are, more often than not, cracked and not exactly self-flattering. Becoming and staying self-aware, whatever this might mean, becomes a strenuous exercise, a quite dizzying one that may also lead you to conclude that one's self is more likely to be an iridescent illusion that guarantees dissatisfaction and anxiety, especially when one is expected to conform to certain social conventions and identify herself accordingly. In the rather short but high-pitched Fleshgraphs, Brynne Rebele-Henry rejects any such easy detectable self in favor of a collection of kaleidoscopic selves, by using her own body as an organic archive of episodes, but also as a filter that might end up clogging every once in a while. It's the bodily reactions to the things happening to her that define each of these somewhat residual selves that ride out any self-conscious censor to tell the story while also giving a new meaning to it."—Minor Literatures

Review Quote

"Painfully adolescent and preternaturally wise, teenage wunderkind Rebele-Henry fills her debut collection with fractured, polyvocal, visceral engagements with darkness and pain--both psychical and physical. Her numerous speakers include a disturbed young mother with an aversion to her baby ("I don't want to name this cartilage/ watermelon, this alien kitten"), a rape victim, a trans man, and the child of a very busy prostitute. They are under the influence of every drug on the planet and self-mutilating in increasingly disturbing ways: swallowing Exacto blades, cutting with a vegetable peeler, and drinking bleach so that their organs "turn shiny and blonde." They have friends named "Billy-Bob Jones," "Fucker John," and "Cookie Monster Rob." Though the overall tone is very bleak, Rebele-Henry has an equally potent sense of humor, referring to "sports moms" with "pseudo lesbian haircuts" and a man with a "DICKLRD" vanity license plate. References to cannibalism, child molestation, mutilation, and sex acts incorporating pig masks skirt the edges of palatability, but they fit with the violently corporeal nature of puberty, which the poet aptly compares to a werewolf's transformation. It is also an age prone to shock value, and the reader eventually becomes numb to it. Rebele-Henry's ability to briefly but fully embody such varied personas indicates a profound emotional intelligence and maturity."

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