Break Self: Feed by Gabrielle Myers

“With Break Self: Feed, Gabrielle Myers asks, ‘what will we make of us, here?’ The question lingers throughout the collection as the verses respond with the lessons of the earth, its cycles of growth and decay, ‘bound by light’s air, uncaged/ humming like wires set in motion.’ This is a collection of longing, becoming, the process of reformation and rebirth, and the search for wholeness as we sing ‘a tune to another narrative/ of us, me, you.’”

–Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things

“Break Self: Feed is stunningly myriad in its complexities, even as it is searingly direct in its line-by-line depiction of our human struggle to know ourselves and others, and to create a life that will “feed” us. The subject-matters of this text are jigsaw-puzzle pieces that mirror a life broken and yet finding the means to cohere.

It is a book raging against the ways we are bent on destruction, of natural world and of each other. Yet it is a book that honors the preciousness of the least living thing and offers that awareness through exactingly expressed depictions one will not soon forget.

And it is a book that brilliantly uses form to speak its subject matter. Here you will find short poems and long, poems that are in couplets or in thick stanzas, and poems whose stanzas stretch across the page. In each, I sense that the forms reflect the emotional resonance of the work. Whether it is a poem of longing, of anger, of eros, of hope, the form speaks to this, through its shape on the page.

I have found in this work that if one has the courage to follow the imperative ‘Break Self,’ then one may find so much that is freed, and so much that will feed the psyche and soul.”

–Rusty Morrison, Co-Founder & Co-Publisher of Omnidawn, author of After Urgency, the true keeps calm biding its story, Beyond the Chainlink, and Risk, forthcoming in 2024

“The poems in Break Self: Feed make rhythmic leaps that mimic leaves, trees, and hummingbirds. These poems express the sense that, despite our destructive tendencies, we belong to all things. Primarily written in first person plural, this book is an exuberant expression of “we” and what that means in a landscape where we are continually cut off and isolated, but where failure can “make us gentle toward each other.” Myers pays close attention to roots, to smoke, to Sycamore and birch, to sunlight itself and urges us to reach out, not away.”

–Jessica Cuello, author of Pricking, By Fire, Hunt, Lair, and Yours, Creature

Break Self: Feed was selected Finalist for the Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets in 2020 by Zack Rogow: “These poems speak of the most inward thoughts about how people relate when extremely close. The book is a sort of phenomenology of intimacy. Often it feels as if this poet has created a new way to use language that doesn’t follow the rules of everyday speech. The words are almost abstract but highly precise in recounting states of mind, and states of the heart. The reader senses that true feelings are being excavated, and they are both unexpected and breathtakingly familiar. In an extraordinary tour de force, the poet maintains a first-person plural ‘we’ narrator through much of the collection, without losing emotional intensity.”

–Zack Rogow, author of Irreverent Litanies, My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, The Number Before Infinity, and The Selfsame Planet