Bruised, by Alia McMurray

Poetry, chapbook, 32 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Bruised is a glimpse into the tangled desires of human consciousness. This is a collection of poems with teeth, that draw you into the internal dichotomies of violence and cleanliness, being good and being bad, what we want and what we won’t let ourselves have. These poems bite back with commentary on societal beauty standards and social media expectations. They ask you to look inward and outward with sharpened eyes.

"Alia McMurray’s Bruised is an excavation of what we’ve lost—and an examination of what we have left—in the anthropocene, with a voice that is brutal, raw and reverent in equal measure. McMurray picks apart the “soft meat” of the body and explores the boundary between animal and human, between emptiness and overconsumption, with a taxonomer’s precision. She knows that “we desire too much,” that “they’ve gutted and / skinned us”—yet she’s able to render these universal truths like a painter would, with gentle strokes and soft light, creating an ecosystem that has never been seen before."

—Francesca Kritikos, author of Exercise in Desire and Animals Don’t Go To Hell

Alia McMurray is a Palestinian-American writer and graduate student based in Chicago. This is her first full length poetry collection. She completed her bachelor’s degree in Multimedia Journalism & Mass Communications and French at Augustana College, and is currently pursuing her master’s degree in teaching English Language Arts at National Louis University in Chicago. She is on Instagram @sweetp0tato.