Stevie Edwards' debut book of poetry, Good Grief, catalogues her elegantly-wrought misadventures as a freshly-graduated, Michigan transplant stumbling over foal legs through Chicago and kneeling down to confront the wreckage of her skinned knees. Whether stopping to disinter some small ruin of a secondhand-clothes childhood, charting the reaches of her own privilege as a white woman in Chicago, or trying to recollect the reasoning behind last night's bar receipts, Stevie's voice -- a treble, equal parts angst and grace -- rumbles deep down in the belly of her poems, and lingers.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOOD GRIEF:

Stevie Edwards tells the truth in a music made for poetry. Good Grief, a title I keep envying, is a thrilling debut of voice-driven poems from a poet wracked by her vision of the world as it is in all its lowly grit and open air. This is the strange comfort of loneliness at its brightest, finest lyric moment. 
–JERICHO BROWN, author of PLEASE

The collection Stevie Edwards presents here is the soundtrack to a young woman discovering her ability to be human, to be equal parts fucked up and beautiful. This youth, however, exists merely in the subjects she tackles, never in lyricism. Truly, Edwards writes with a mastery way beyond her years. It's almost irritating how good she is.
–J.W. BASILO, author and performer


Stevie Edwards speaks unflinchingly—she faces love, desire, grief, loneliness, family, the world, without ever turning away, in a voice that’s vulnerable and raw, piercing and honest, crafted and bold. These poems open with seeming simplicity, twist gracefully, and then leave us lyrically breathless.
–HELENA MESA, author of HORSE DANCE UNDERWATER


When you read Stevie Edwards' words, every organ in your body will feel like it is shutting down. The lungs are forgetting their purpose, the liver is shriveling up and each finger is crippling unto each other as she insists "save a little rum in your belly to unwolf into new mud." Edwards is taking all the oxygen with these poems...and it hurts so good. 
–MAHOGANY L. BROWNE, author, performer, and publisher

Edwards transcends that fueling debate that "spoken" or "page" poetry are genres at all, and what remains is an explosion of language that both defies academic standards while remaining consistently strong; each line and image, when isolated, remains flawless, obviously obsessed over to perfection, with an unmatched ability to penetrate readers and hit them in that poetry muscle that only flexes when in awe.
–STEPHANIE LANE SUTTON, writer-in residence at West Side School for the Desperate