Rock, Sweat, Scissors

This book is not "the common victim narrative" (Steven Reigns). If it were a child, it would most likely be hushed for its rudeness. It would be dismissed for more pleasant conversation rather than for its ruminations: a childhood crush on Jeffrey Dahmer, a sexually charged reading of Pinocchio, and a father complex not without sexual desire and violence. This book is a child ranting, lashing out, meaning to hurt, and hurting to know itself-doing anything to connect to the reader, to God, to an abusive father, and, yes, even to Dahmer. Rock, Sweat, Scissors explores sexual abuse without shyness and self-censor. In these poems, a young man, who becomes aroused from his father's inappropriate touches, and who still desires his father's affection even after he is raped, makes no apology for his feelings and, no matter how uncomfortable he makes his reader, does not stop talking about it-nor should he or anyone who is a survivor of abuse. By talking he cannot undo the past, but he can give himself a voice, a say, in it.