hours inside out

This first collection by Isabella Preisz is built around the idea of living through several moments at once. Its poems return to adolescence, early sexual experimentation, shame, and the sense of drifting away from oneself, rebuilding those scenes on the page.

Preisz asks what it is like to live inside a body after it has been violated. Throughout the book, language is broken apart and rearranged, so that healing reads not as a straight line but as one mass made of what came before, what is happening now, and what is still to be remembered.

Working at the edge where words are still taking shape, the collection presents recovery as something soft and unstable. Its image is egg yolk: runny, gooey, and quick to burst.