Fish Love

In Fish Love, Bryanna Licciardi leans into her obsessive nature and twisted humor, offering readers a landscape of bizarre realism. From dark, familial narratives to imagined dates with serial killers, she eagerly distorts the line between love and loathing, self and other, fantasy and actuality. With a dreamlike quality and gut-punching lines, Licciardi guides readers through the stages of rage, hurt, laughter, and raw memory, ultimately ending her debut full-length poetry collection in the realm of hope among the most sinister of places—regret.

Content Warning: school bullying, othering, sexual predation, serial killers, death, menstruation, cannibalism of the dead, body image, sexual situations, eating disorders, physical and sexual violence, self-harm, parental discord, anxiety

Praise

“Bryanna Licciardi’s Fish Love is full of regret—in the best way possible. In these poems, regret becomes a passageway, opening door after door, leading to both knowledge and acceptance of the self, a self that is creative and cruel in turns. These poems explore identity as constructed by geography, genes, and gender: ‘I’m still unraveling,’ the speaker notes, ‘the truth that belonging means offering up / pieces of yourself like sacrifice.’ It’s a strategically unsettling book as it juxtaposes narratives of serial killers alongside memories of difficult grandmothers, of problematic parents, of the ongoing frustration with ‘the realization / that my dissatisfaction was not / with people, but with / their predictability.’ Fish Love is anything but predictable. It evades the hook as it limns the space between desire and destruction, between loving and changing the self, between regret and slippery, fishy relief.”
—Amie Whittemore,
author of Glass Harvest

“Ah, love! In Bryanna Licciardi’s hands, the slippery fish makes virgins into sex addicts and women into desserts because they, too, are ‘served last.’ To swim in this school is to reason with babies one never plans to have and learn that ‘freedom is a sword / with too many edges.’ Fish Love finds us all outmatched by the depths, unless we let love off the hook for its fishiness and let it lure us beyond ourselves.”
—Amy Wright,
author of Paper Concert

“In Bryanna Licciardi’s piercingly observant collection, profound longing and nostalgia introduce us to a speaker aware and prescient of the body, political and sensual, in all its complexities. The body is one, the body is multiple, Licciardi reminds us, as she writes simultaneously toward and away from childhood memory. She also reminds us that originality has to do with what is timeless turned sideways: ‘After months of thinking otherwise, / I am concluding less and less.’ Formally inventive, syntactically animate, Fish Love is sinister and funny, egoless and immaculate, and convinces us how ‘belonging means offering up / pieces of yourself like sacrifice.’”
—Gary McDowell,
author of Aflame

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• Poetry
• 5” x 8” Perfectbound Trade Paperback
• Cream Paper, 112 Pages
• Paperback ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-50-4
• Paperback ISBN-10: 1-946580-50-3
• Hardcover ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-51-1
• Hardcover ISBN-10: 1-946580-51-1
• Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-946580-52-8
• Ebook ISBN-10: 1-946580-52-X
• LCCN: 2024933406
• First Edition: July 30, 2024
• Short URL: Coming soon
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Cover design by Leah Angstman, with artwork by Wolfgang Eckert.

BRYANNA LICCIARDI resists the question, “Where are you from?” She has lived all over the country—California, Texas, Michigan, Massachusetts, Louisiana—and currently resides in a small town near Nashville, Tennessee. She is a degree collector of sorts, with a BA from Austin Peay State University, an MFA from Emerson College, and a doctorate from Middle Tennessee State University. She works as an English lecturer and professional development coordinator, also at MTSU. Her spare time is spent taking care of four cats and one husband. Licciardi’s first book, Skin Splitting, is a poetry chapbook from Finishing Line Press (2017). Her literary works have also appeared in such publications as BlazeVox, Cleaver Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Red Flag Poetry, and The Adirondack Review. For more about her work, go to bryannalicciardi.com.

Media & Images

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