Limited Edition Hardcover - ALL OF THIS WAS ONCE UNDER WATER: poems by Natalie Padilla Young
"All of This Was Once Under Water is entrancing, beguiling, disquieting—a collection of poetic dispatches from a terrain of lost faith and ecological decline. A genderless alien from another world, a philosophical monster residing in the Great Salt Lake, and a human “She” with a long-buried trauma: these are just some of the dramatis personae in this compendious collection that make the familiar strange again. Interspersed fragments of history about the birth of the Mormon Church comment ironically on our current state. The tone isn’t elegiac. There is hope in these searching poems, in their sensuous encounter with nature—not to mention a love affair between alien and human. The wondrous attention, the wry melancholy, and the sly humor of these poems will allow readers to glimpse their own lives with new eyes." —Dan O’Brien
In All of This Was Once Under Water, Natalie Padilla Young conjures a physical and metaphysical universe in which the history of the Great Salt Lake and the struggles of her Mormon ancestors intertwine. Narratives of suffering, phantasmagorical legend, environmental threat, science, faith, love, and gender fluidity unspool in language as pristine and biting as salt. A great imagination is at work in these poems as Young probes the enmeshed lives of an alien, a lone human She, and a mythic monster in startling diction and syntax and haunting imagery. - Teresa Cader, History of Hurricanes, The Paper Wasp, Guests
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This Limited Edition will be printed in full color! This includes a blue vellum dust jacket, with offset printing, full color interior on matte pages, custom end sheets, and 8+ illustrations by Maximiliane Spieß! (Not including many other decorative items and embellishments throughout)!
Only 250 copies have been printed, each hand numbered.
The book is 6x9" and is 97 pages.
About the Author:
Natalie Padilla Young is a founding and managing editor for the poetry magazine Sugar House Review. By day, she works as an art director for an ad agency based out of Salt Lake City. These poems are part of a manuscript that mixes factual scenery and history with speculative fiction, in order to explore peculiarities in human nature, culture, identity, and environment. Poems from this series have been published in Green Mountains Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Terrain.org, Drunken Boat, Pilgrimage, and elsewhere. Natalie is half Puerto Rican and half Brigham Young. NatalieYoungArts.com
About the Artist:
Maxi Spieß, born in 1992, has studied illustration, once upon a time mainly focusing on comics, and creative writing. She lives in a rather catholic city in western Germany, where she works as an illustrator and is writing novels in her free time. Her favourite techniques include ink drawing and lino cut, everything that provides stark black-and-white contrasts, while her creativity is fuelled by coffee, bagpipes and spiraling trips down research-rabbitholes.
INTERNATIONAL PEEPS: As always, if you are interested in purchasing this book, please contact me via email or Instagram to create a custom listing that covers the shipping costs.
