Peach Milk, by Chimen Georgette Kouri

Prose, chapbook, 40 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

A femininely gothic collection, Peach Milk emphasizes the comfort of lingering; the pressure one can feel when it is necessary to take control. It is about grief and why grief plays such a dominant role in what it means to be the eldest daughter, the next heir to resist her family’s trauma; the duct tape sticking to other people’s wounds, their failures, their pasts.

The narrator of Peach Milk is angry. Angry because everything falls on her; everything feels the same; everything always ends in blood. As each story unfolds, her shackles remain, and she doesn’t know if one day she will rest; if one day she will restore what was properly given to her: her life.

Chimen Kouri is a writer based in Cliffwood Beach, New Jersey. Her work has been featured in Goat’s Milk Magazine, Blood Moon Poetry, Up the Staircase Quarterly, and more. She fell in love with storytelling one Christmas morning during a power outage when she and her parents laid in bed while her father told stories about his life in Lebanon. She is currently writing two full-length poetry and prose collections, What Haunts Me the Most and The Old Dutchburn House, and her first novel, Miss America Is Burning. When she isn’t writing, you can find her cuddling her dogs and cats and rewatching The Last Kingdom on Netflix. For more of her work, check her out on Instagram @chimenkouri.