“This ferocious debut reads like no other. Where grief and exuberance dance under an encauldroned blood moon, mellifluous pyrotechnic cantatas hurl cacophonous fissile sparks, the unsung summoned into being. I am astounded by the invention and necessity of Mackenzie Polonyi’s mutating forms, multigenerational matriarchy writ mythically large and tragically precise in the wide wake of Hungary’s seeded diaspora.”
—Timothy Liu, author of Down Low and Lowdown

“This formally restless—indeed, volcanic—collection disgorges poems of testimony and supplication, unsettling yet embodied, mercurial yet real. Ravenously, Mackenzie Polonyi embraces her maternal genealogy, transforming tragic histories of violence into a lyrical lament of immense linguistic intensity. This is poetry that turns lack into excess, elegy into a procession of alchemical adjectives, pain into a fever of the figurative. Opening this book is akin to entering a butcher shop where a girl-child—‘raised secondhand homesick’—has been hoarding her grief between sugared milk and vinegar. Her rebellion against speechlessness is mounting page after page: ‘The history of a daughter is growing a garden of blood for a wound with a stomach of air that will swallow time like a mirror.’”  
—Valzhyna Mort, author of Music for the Dead and Resurrected