Sweet Beast

In this collection of poems, Gabriella R. Tallmadge strips away our soft exteriors and exposes the feral desires which escape from their cages when facing the possibility of death. Sweet Beast reflects a marriage wounded by the aftermath of a soldier's return from war, relating trauma in the only way it can be told: raw and with no embellishment.

Tallmadge creates excruciating images onto the page, nurses them, and lets the poems bleed out. In cars kneading coyotes into asphalt, birds knifing through wind, and the torturous fear of death that transforms us into beasts, Tallmadge cuts to the bone to find love within the formidable survival instincts of our primitive self. Sweet Beast is a collection that is as rife with love as much as it is searing with fear, demanding the reader to pivot between the two.