PREORDER: Field Notes from a Cult by Nelle Yvon

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.”

–Diana Khoi Nguyen, author of Ghost of and Root Fractures 

"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