Becoming the Virgin
by Taylor Jacob Pate

Poetry
ISBN: 9780900575990
Release Date: April 2016
$16

Simultaneously enchanting and brutal, taylor jacob pate’s debut book Becoming the Virgin is a work of desperate intensity. This series of interconnected confessional-cum-fairy-tale poems whisk the reader along at a breakneck pace. pate’s language is at once hard and gem-like, exquisitely ornate, and succinctly muscular. The text oscillates from spellbinding beauty and wonder to undercurrents of uncontrollable violence, passion, pain, and melee. It travels the fluxes between self and creature. It loses itself in dark forests of language: branches in which we all become entangled.

“These poems melt the psychic icons of whiteboyhood and pastoral po’ into wild, twitching wax.”

— Joe Hall

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

taylor jacob pate is a writer, painter & runner born in New Orleans & raised lots of other places. He received his MFA from The New Writer’s Project at UT Austin. Along with his partner Blake Lee Pate, he founded & edits Smoking Glue Gun.