: once teeth bones coral :

Author: Kimberly Alidio 

Publisher: Belladonna* (2020)

A rendering of queer affects of desire, loss, and travel, : once teeth bones coral : undoes in language normative relations of self, lover, body, nature, verb, noun, adjective, and concept.

"In : once teeth bones coral :, Kimberly Alidio pulls language apart and what remains is as striking as it is spare. The form here is a container, haunting in its spaciousness, and gestures towards landscapes, borders, trauma, tenderness, home. Alidio’s poems reveal the “luminous familiar,” traces of the interior that make visible the simultaneity of histories and futures, the possibilities inherent in queer connection, kinship, and refusal. These fragments are precise and expansive, and will resonate for a very long time."

–cheena marie lo

"this is a book of echoing and overhearing : breath and trembling : desert and sky : woundedness and gossip : intellectual wandering : time zones, moans, unmanned cocktails, medicine, grief and self-care : kimberly alidio resurfacing : landscapes of queered intimacies : for you to hold close : mucus and saliva : humor and loss : a dyke bar : a rubberplant : compound words and timeless histories : intersectional identities : porous and monumental : once teeth bones coral : now slowing you down : now filling you up :"

–Gabrielle Civil