Nepenthe Radiant

The nepenthe is a mythical drug that quells all worry, grief and pain. Aimee Seu returns after her battering ram of a first collection, Velvet Hounds (winner of the 2020 Akron Poetry Prize), to spellbind once again. In Nepenthe Radiant, we pass into a world where there are symphonies in every silence, peace where we expect cacophony and nightmare in the silken fold of a kiss. Here, torment and bliss intermingle in one potent and addictive tincture. "I am now a part of the living's selfish need to depict the dead in heaven," Seu writes. Yet, the grand distances of these narratives span farther-shadowed underworlds, lost possible universes, spinning dreamscapes, nearly-unspeakable loneliness. Seu's biracial, pansexual poetics examine poverty, addiction, violence and mental illness with tenderness and moxy. Sapphic ceremonials, elegies for wayward teenage heroes, the ransacked temple of youth, ecstasies of a tumultuous, obsessive romance, all unravel before us in the blazing hallucinogenics of Seu's rich and urgent rendering. Reader, fall into the siren echoes of these pages, their one moment raucous and swollen, then barrenly low tides. Get lost inside heartbreak's "kaleidoscopic, continuous bloom." Gaze into the "stained glass cornea" of the beloved.