{f}ragile Nests

Pella {f}elton comes from "a box that should not exist," and ever since she escaped that can of worms, she's been starving for something better. In her debut collection from Roadside Press, Pella uses her wit, heart, and startling intellect to move through a shifting landscape of contested memories, shrinking biomes, and birds-so many birds. Pella {f}elton wants you to know this isn't a book about birds, but that doesn't mean she isn't flying toward something.

The resulting text is a dense, ambitious, and poignant exploration of what it means to migrate into one's self, toward a home she knows will someday fail, and the odd assortment of pleasures, pains, and precarities she finds along the way. Drawing from her archive and changing repertoire, {f}elton charts a relentless, heartbreaking, and triumphant passage through the forgotten queer ecosystems of Midwest America-the sex rituals of American Girl dolls, the examination room at a Planned Parenthood, even the literal garden of Eden.

Part excavation of the man she never was, part declaration of the woman she's becoming, {f}ragile Nests carries the reader through these contested habitats like a stone in her pocket, ultimately discovering that even if she is fragile, she is still a nest to someone.