In these compact folds, curls of words on page in coiled small shapes, host body becomes night sky and increasingly intimate terms flex gut songs. Germ fable churns in compositional allegory, and a Frankenstein story is rescaled and mutates on the level of cell and issue. Laurel Radzieski is a wildly original poet in this purging of confusion and charges with whom or what speaks through what we or one carries around in the cosmos inside.

Red Mother asks the reader to consider a meaty host’s innards as objects of desire: written from the perspective of a parasite, these short poems force us to “Imagine a blemish / or, better yet, a sore” with a kind of twisted love. Like a teeming catalog of left-justified grubs, Radzieski’s poems become progressively more objectifying, abusive, desperate for pure disembodied flesh. Where the speaker-worm begins from a place of supposed tenderness — “This is a love poem / I’ll prove it to you” — its impending demise, a growing hunger for possession, soon turns it egomaniacal: “I am securing / your humanity. … A ‘thank you’ / would be nice”; “If I was so unwanted / why did you lead me on / with your fluids?” To be human, the poems imply, is to writhe and squirm with that which eats away at you, those particular types of repulsive creatures so blind to their own being that they ask “Is this my anus / or my mouth / or something more useful?”

If you're in the mood for some wackier fare, Red Mother by poet Laurel Radzieski depicts an all-consuming love affair -- between a parasite and its host. Told from the parasite's perspective, Radzieski's quirky yet sinister poems take the reader through the organism's life cycle, teetering between science and imagination. Red Mother is a dark tale of longing, achieving the perfect balance of horror and romance.

For a metaphor to work it needs to be real and Laurel Radzieski, in Red Mother, gives voice to an all too real parasite. A cross between Kafka and a horror film, these concise, concrete poems slowly burn until they overtake us through profound recognition. Dare we call her parasite love?"

Halfway through Laurel Radzieski's Red Mother she writes, "There are so many ways to tell this story, / all sickening. / So much of who we are / requires purging." With that idea in mind, there are many ways to read this inventive and complex collection of short poems that take on the life cycle of a parasite. The poems are at once scientific and fantastical but can easily be a metaphor for our own dependent relationships. Radzieski's sparse style brings a sharp cleanness to a rather messy topic.