Revenge Body
Revenge Body
Rachel Wiley, 2022
Winner – ALA Stonewall Book Award for Poetry
Revenge Body is Rachel Wiley’s third collection of poetry, full of the sharp wit and bold honesty we know and love. Wiley invites her readers to join her on a journey filled with righteous anger, Black identity, magic, mental health, navigating maternal relationships, and the love and loss that comes from a breakup.
Awards
2023 Stonewall Book Award - Barbara Gittings Literature Award for Poetry - Winner
2023 Feathered Quill Awards - Poetry - Finalist
Praise for Rachel Wiley
Revenge Body dares you to see the full spectrum of what it means to be truly and vibrantly human. We are all lucky to live in a world where a woman like Rachel Wiley trusts us enough to lift her veil, and welcome us behind the curtain.
— Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, author of How to Love the Empty Air
Rachel Wiley’s Revenge Body is a blue star blooming in the throat and you need this heat. Wiley guides through the intimacies of family, body, love, and health with an assertive tenderness, unabashed humanity, wit and bravado. Her poems brawl with bold rhythms, bolder forms, and gut-punching confession. Through these poems, Wiley teaches us to delight in the messiness of ourselves.
— Diamond Forde, author of Mother Body
Searing, commanding, and relentlessly brilliant, Revenge Body is a visceral journey of how to come home to yourself after a history of hurt. This collection is truly genius. Rachel Wiley makes me want to be a better writer, and there are poems in here that will welcomely haunt me for the rest of my life. What a masterpiece, what a breathtaking dive.
— Mary Lambert, author of Shame is an Ocean I Swim Across