Bestial Mouths

by Brenda S. Tolian

Genres: Gothic; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Bestial mouths whisper, calling you into a labyrinth of nightmares, metamorphosis, and the liminal spaces of the beautiful grotesque lurking within the human psyche. Tolian's debut poetry collection is an unequivocal battlecry for the exploited. Stripped of ornament, the language bites deep, revealing a suspended symbology of human and beast, intimacy and violence, life and death. This book bites deep, exploring themes of identity, metamorphosis, and the primal urge for survival, weaving through time, myth, and shifting perspectives.

The verses serve as a grimoire, an invocation, and a meditation on agency and autonomy over the body and soul—whether it is inherent, taken, sold, stolen, lost, reclaimed, or forcefully wrested back into the self. Sit down on the forest floor, dig your fingers into the soil, and open wide your bestial mouths, consume these words whispered in the darkness.

Tolian, “terrifies and engages, repels and stimulates, her language turning most beautiful when it most frightens. If you have found yourself googling any of the following—serial killers; the creepiness of teeth; the perspective from beneath ground; female rage—Brenda S. Tolian’s Bestial Mouths is your must-read. These poems do what writing should do: make you want to close the book and reread—as a simultaneous impulse.”—Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade & The Bigness of the World

“… an astonishing artistic achievement. She writes beautiful words that tell us terrible things; fever dreams portending our deepest truths.—Jon Bassoff, author of Beneath Cruel Waters

“Each poem is a dark ritual of flesh, bone, and blood-soaked desire. This collection is not for the faint-hearted—its lines pulse with feral intensity, binding readers to a dark magic both horrific and beautiful. Every verse is an invocation, drawing you deeper into the beast within. Bestial Mouths does not just ask to be read, it demands to be felt, to be devoured, until nothing remains but bone and breathless awe.”—Shane Hawk, co-editor of the Never Whistle at Night franchise

"This collection is cigarettes and centipedes. It’s men under lurid light posts and missing girl posters. Truly, a dark delight."—Erika T. Wurth, author of White Horse

“…grabs by the handfuls the soil, the mountains, hell, the root of a narrative controlling women while also erasing our existence. Burdened, buried, beloved—Tolian demands the reader as a witness. There is no looking away from the powerful imagery and the pain cradled within as Tolian creates within her world an incantation of reclamation.”—Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura

“An Alice in Wonderland mushroom trip—part psilocybin, part nightshade—careening down an unsettling poetic labyrinth that alternates between caresses and stabbings, lips and fangs, perfume and poison. Like learning that your lover is a serial killer but you won’t leave because you’re enjoying every depraved moment together."—Mario Acevedo, author of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats

 

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Release date: November 14, 2024

Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press

Print pages: 81

Sample

Melioë

close your eyes love, let me swallow you down

into the darkness, into the ground

within the nightmare wrapped in the pain

everything is nonsense, nothing the same

cut me open

ripped—wide

my heart it is beating

whispered questions

why

this is where it started

the yawning divide

and this is how it ends

no one here

to cry

stories on paper

eventual end

baptism of blood

brought on by

sin

lies on the lips

cutting of nails

scrying the future

in mountain cut trails

hear the wind

moaning

the earth catches the heel

the bestial mouths

chanting dark spells

my body is changing, ...