Your Own Sky by Beth Gylys coming soon for purchase!
Synopsis
Your Own Sky: A Book of Breakups explores the many forms heartbreak takes—personal, psychological, political, and even existential. Through inventive structures ranging from lyric sequences and narrative poems to questionnaires, prayers, equations, and hybrid forms, the collection examines the aftermath of ruptured relationships and the surprising transformations they provoke. Gylys’s speakers move through grief’s rawness—wandering cities newly emptied of meaning, clinging to rituals and magical thinking, confronting self-doubt and self-sabotage, and revisiting past selves with humor and candor. Breakups appear as revisions, revelations, distortions, and unlikely love stories; as Barbie dolls abandoned on the roadside, scrambled eggs signaling an ending, or friends offering an “anti-breakup” of deep steadiness. Across these shifting modes, the poems reveal heartbreak as both wound and aperture—an invitation to shed illusions, reclaim the self, and inhabit, at last, one’s own sky.
Praise for Your Own Sky: A Book of Breakups
What an extraordinary collection! As I read Your Own Sky: A Book of Breakups, I was so captivated, I couldn’t put it down. With each poem, Beth Gylys masterfully illuminates the twists of thought and the whimsical beliefs that surface at the end of a relationship. Whether she is comparing a breakup to a naked Barbie abandoned on the roadside or to an Epistemological Uncertainty, she strikes a perfect balance between humor and authenticity, making her poems deeply relatable. Part-poet and part metaphysician, Gylys points out that the end of love is as mysterious and transformative as its beginning. “Who would I be,” she asks, “without an I and an I?” And: “Love begins and ends/with gesture.” My only complaint, the book ends so soon.
—Nin Andrews
Nobody but Beth Gylys could create a speaker who is half avenging goddess and half mortal woman made up of “intestines, snot,” emerging from the mythic underworld or from the darkness of post-breakup depression to curse and scream and turn her tormentor to stone. And nobody but Gylys could do so with the humor, intelligence, and flair for unforgettable phrasing that we longtime fans of hers have come to expect. But be forewarned: once you start reading this little book of breakups, you will never want to break up with it.
—Julie Kane
Award-winning author, Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, and the co-founder/Principal Investigator of Beyond Bars: A Journal of Literature and Art, a Mellon Foundation sponsored literary journal for incarcerated writers and artists, Beth Gylys is the author of five books of poetry and three chapbooks. Her work has recently appeared in the Birmingham Poetry Review, West Branch, The James Dickey Review, SWWIM and on the Best American Poetry blog.