Yell

• Yell
• Price: $10.00
• Sarah Sousa
• Chapbook - Poetry
• ISBN: 978-1-949540-07-9
• 2018 Summer Tide Pool Selection

2018 Summer Tide Pool Selection

A page by page erasure of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, Sousa’s Yell subverts and contemporizes the original story of an oppressed housewife, and would-be writer, driven mad. In this version, the heroine speaks of her repression and slow descent into the amnesia of self, before finally awakening to the many women she contains. Though her emancipation is preceded by something which resembles the madness of Gilman’s original, this shadow heroine ultimately claims her haunted, multifarious nature. She chooses liberation, surfacing from the nightmare conscious of her capacity for darkness and light; owning them both and fully awake.

A LOOK INSIDE:

11

I felt I was a draught
and couldn’t shut
the window.
I am afraid
of moonlight.
I take pains
to make self.
There is something
strange
about me.

HYPE

“All good erasures grasp something that waits behind the language of their original text. Yell does just that, retaining the haunted observations of her predecessor, but with a sharp and tender contemporary voice at its core. Sousa’s line breaks, choices, sensibilities, are evocative and pitch-perfect. It is chilling to the bone by the end. These elegant snippets are themselves, beautiful torn fragments of yellow wallpaper at our feet.”
–Bianca Stone

“In the era of #MeToo, Sarah Sousa’s Yell offers the rejuvenation of an imperative tale. Yell is a startling collection, stimulating, bittersweet, seemingly quiet, yet seamed through with ferocity. Sousa’s erasures render an essence delicate as a bottled scent, an extract Dickinsonian in its fragmented suggestion. The book’s speaker claims: ‘I’m getting a little afraid/I’m awake.’ Readers of this extraordinary chapbook will feel the same.”
–Jennifer Militello