Book Description

You Look Like Hell is an arson-charred, sultry-eyed, bump-in-the-night book of poems that provides room to revel in your villain curiosity. Awash with a fresh independence, Schuyler Peck examines a struggle to allow herself anger, grief, and indulgence in the pilgrimage back to herself. Wielding a sharp smirk and a defiant vulnerability, You Look Like Hell explores religious harm, feminine rage, the bravery required to leave a turbulent marriage, alienation from our own emotions, how to create a nourishing found family, and why some of the most rewarding acts of reclamation require baptism by fire. "What has this life / left in me," asks Schuyler Peck in her harrowing and hopeful new collection, You Look Like Hell--and the answer is a richness of effulgent contradictions. These focused, furious, and feral poems investigate and ultimately redefine the procedures of aftermath, laying bare our dazzling capacity to inhabit several layers of experience all at once, to "hold both grief / and a gratitude for having chosen it." Here we find Peck sifting resolutely through the wreckages--the Hells--of abuse, divorce, and God, holding the shards and fragments up to the light, and repurposing them to construct wondrous new organisms, new selves, ever resilient and elastic and wild."--Jeremy Radin, actor and author of Dear Sal and Slow Dance with Sasquatch "In Schuyler Peck's newest collection, rage slips into running shoes, grief flips through the yellow pages, and Marilyn Monroe emerges from the bathtub with a sigh. These poems have a bite sharp enough to leave a mark, deep enough to linger with you long after you've read the final lines. You Look Like Hell excavates memory, loss, anger, and hope through heart-wrenching imagery and unapologetic metaphors. It shows us that even in the aftermath of bitter change, the incredible sweetness of this life awaits. It reminds us that there is no reason you cannot return to yourself."--Caitlin Conlon, author of The Surrender Theory and co-founder of Unearth Writing Retreats Poetry, LGBTQ+ Studies, Women's Studies.