Sundress Publications is excited to announce that pre-orders are now open for Abigail Raley’s Wet Specimen, a poetry collection dedicated to celebrating sensuality, tenderness, and the rewilding of the self.
In her debut collection, Raley curates a portrait of desire that moves through ecoscapes, homescapes, and genderscapes. Lush with surreal metaphors and fiercely devoted to a corporeal lexicon, these poems echo slick humor while protesting gendered power dynamics. Through prose poems, free verse, and pantoums, Wet Specimen interrogates the primal capacity to want, to hate, and to love. Raley’s inventive poems resist rigidity in favor of play, eroticism, and embodied discovery. Attentive to sickness, animals, love, and gender, Wet Specimen revels in a profound wonder of flesh, pus, and lust, encouraging the merging of self and body with the natural world.
Gabrielle Bates, author of Judas Goat, writes, “Abigail Raley defamiliarizes the body, alchemizing the estrangements of illness and violence into a bold poetics, turning expectations on their heads and exhibiting a grotesque sensualism that calls to mind such greats as Kim Hyesoon and Clarice Lispector. Wet Specimen will keep you leaning forward even as you squirm, riveted by convergences of the muck and loveliness of what it is to be alive.”
You can pre-order your copy on the Sundress website today!
Abigail Raley is a poet and library worker from Bowling Green, Kentucky. She is a 2024 Pushcart Prize nominee, and she has earned her MFA from the University of Montana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Hanging Loose Magazine, HAD, The Stone Circle Review, and elsewhere.
