Gwendalynn Roebke starts a bruxist manifesto with "we", and that tells us that we are welcomed, we belong. It also tells us that if you ain't tryna make things better, you can't escape this mess that the rest of us are in. I feel powerful reading this book, because Gwendalynn gives language to the impossible, which makes me feel ready, finna roar at all y'all. They remind us that "pressure, is, e v e r y t h i n g" while showing various pressures from the body to cultures, and applying their own pressure to counteract. Roebke gives us tools to stay alive, and thrive.
Steven Dunn, author of Potted Meat and water & power
Gwendalynn Roebke's voice is forthright and unflinching. The speaker of these poems asks hard and searing questions of the self and of humanity.
"Can you scrub suffering from plasma?"...
"Why delude our/perceptions/hoping injury will/hurt less?"
"...if there were no taste to lying would you still indulge so often?"
These 26 "bruxist" poems gnaw as well as invite us toward "black holes" of knowing and not knowing, all the while nudging the reader out of stasis and reminding that "time has always been hesitant to love us."
I look forward to more work from this new writer.
Marcia Douglas, author of The Marvellous Equations of the Dread
A Bruxist Manifesto presents us Gwendalynn Roebke as an old soul taking new form. Journal entries that read as songs of the Earth. A graceful fuck you dancing ballet over our hearts. Prophecy at the mezcla of eastern and western philosophy. An ululation attempting to call in the absurd ego of humanity in a wet world facing fire. Roebke's prose grinds down any borders that try to dim this burning holler of sorrow and hope. This manifesto of unabashed truth ringing generations forwards and backward, sideways and slantways.
Brice Maiurro, Founding Editor, South Broadway Press
