“Somebody stacked up these bricks and we live in the spaces between them.

                     Your body is mostly called woman and mine mostly is too.”

 

In And They Say That We Are Strange, the domestic becomes surreal, the intimate becomes mythic, and love — queer, feral, tender — spills out between the bricks of ordinary life.

 

These poems peer through the cracks in our constructed worlds: a small home shared with a “furry psychopath” becomes a study in ritual and defiance; a lover brings home a many-headed squid that tattoos the walls with its inky tenets; desire stretches, splits, and blooms into new shapes.

 

Visceral, lyrical, and darkly funny, umbilica’s collection invites readers into the spaces between tenderness and ferocity, domesticity and wilderness; beyond prescribed structures and into the wilds of the beautifully personal—where, against all odds, we call this love.