It Gets Cold

“j. avery’s it gets cold lives in the chills it makes in your body. Here are instructions for being a ghost, and here is a reckoning if you read these words as metaphors. avery’s incisive poetics are careful in all the ways it can mean to care: to consider, to shield, to nurture, to advise, to take time / and space, to ‘move as though space / do not move as through space.’ Her experiment with ‘trying on / death’ as a queer ghost knows its own risks and rude forebears, bristling at Edelman’s death drive while courting the refrain, ‘i am certainly going to die, and fuck you!’ avery’s ghost poems imagine and give shape to a ‘body that is its own escape,’ seeping through the borders we have come to expect between poems, between words and images, between line / and line / and line. it gets cold is an exhilarating first answer to its own, infinitely open question: ‘what can the ghost give form to?’”

    Liz Bowen, author of Sugarblood