Gigglepuss is a mesmerizing world tucked inside of a young girl’s heart. Entrenched in memory, Gigglepuss interrogates experiences, a sense of self, and an untameable desire to be loved. From girlhood to womanhood, Blume allows us to peek through the keyhole, unlock the door and travel across the raw, peeled back underbelly of a life lived, and living. In doing so she reminds us that the experiences that do indeed shape us do not define us. —Chelene Knight author of the award-winning memoir, Dear Current Occupant

Carlie Blume is a poet of nostalgia and bays, family and the moon. The speakers in her poems come of age in the “leftover air” of dead malls and pines, seeing what we would like not to see: violence and tenderness in the lives of girls and women. Gigglepuss is a riot for the heartstrings. —Shazia Hafiz Ramji, author of Port of Being

You might be tempted (and forgiven) for deep diving into your own nostalgia after reading Blume’s Gigglepuss, and like the protagonist, you'll remember and feel the sharpness of the past, of loneliness, of figuring one’s place in this world, and contending with life's demons. Blume’s voice is sharp, at times quirky, cutting through the haze of sentimentality; there’s no self-pity here. A wonderful debut collection. —Junie Désil, author of eat salt|gaze at the ocean

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