Preorder Field Notes from a Cult
Preorder Field Notes from a Cult by Nelle Yvon, selected by this year's judge, Diana Khoi Nguyen as the 2026 Lefty Blondie Press First Chapbook Award winner.
This is what Diana had to say about Nelle's chapbook manuscript: "Field Notes from a Cult excavates one’s past in order to “release the hot poison” that still clings to the present via memory. These unflinching poems paint exquisite photographs of precise moments: a mother before Baptism, how domestic violence began in a marriage, how abuse manifests in a friend’s family, too. I cannot imagine what it was like to grow up in a cult, and in this deft poet’s hands, the pervasive toxicity of this period comes alive in startling ways: a 5-year-old submerging dolls to trap demons, a mother’s bruised jaw as she silences her children because her husband is “still angry.” I read each page, rapt, and was filled with sorrow, rage, and dread; these poems grant access to foreign and familial landscapes. The emotional terrains are intimate, deeply familiar, poignant resonant. This chapbook acutely captures the “cult-shaped hole” in our country, and how it always “needs filling.”
"Part bildungsroman, part docu-poetics, part survivor story, Nelle Yvon’s debut chapbook, Field Notes from a Cult, introduces us to a young speaker born to parents who have joined a cult. With artful lyricism and arresting imagery, Yvon captures a world that is both upside-down (lurking demons, end times suitcases packed and at the ready) and completely normal. In this assiduously crafted, beautifully written, difficult-to-define gem of a collection, Yvon renders her environment’s eccentricities, abuses, misogyny, and hypocrisy humorously, humanely and with wisdom." -Dr. Beth Gylys, Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University
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