Pretty Little Cannibals

This book is a warning. I warn you against loving in all of its forms. It is a bloodletting from which you will never recover.

Perhaps if I had received such a warning, I would now be whole - instead I am scattered across the earth; An arm here, a leg there, heart divided in four quarters amongst ungrateful and insatiable lovers.

Oh, but what about your children - you may ask? Have they not loved you?

You are a romantic and unrealistic if you think birthing and nurturing secures a place in the hearts of children - they grow up and then what? You become a ghost lingering in the back of their pupils and in the caverns of their throat. You become a haunting

Ah - you get it now. Again, stay away from loving. It is a nasty business.

Joyce Angela Jellison-Hounkanrin's writing style has been triumphed as being in the tradition of Nikki Giovanni; clean and bleached bone in it's delivery of harsh truths based on observations and lived experience. In the past there has been an open invite to sit with Ms. Jellison-Hounkanrin at her kitchen table - if indeed, that is where she writes and peer over her shoulder as she crafts, slicing words open to reveal the glimmering white flesh beneath.