“‘I’m not an especially brave or brilliant person,’ writes Lisa Wells, but in Delinquents she is utterly both. These essays are superbly attuned to ambivalence—to the ways in which desire, shame, grief, ambition, care, and art-making take us ever further from certainty—and they offer us the thrilling companionship of a remarkable mind at work, in flux, and in conversation. Entwining her own history with the voices of artists from Baldwin to Sexton to Whitesnake, Wells probes the uncanny corners of kinship with self and other.” —Leni Zumas, author of Wolf Bells

“I am moved most by life stories where improvisation is the beating heart. In Delinquents, Lisa Wells illuminates how it is that some of us have to make shit up in order to survive at all. This breathtakingly hopeful impulse at the center of chaos-ridden terrain—like poverty, failed relationships, death and grief, this drive to invent a story you can live with—is what art is about. I cried. I laughed. I raged. I felt kindred.” —Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Reading the Waves

“Lisa Wells is one of my favorite living essayists, and with Delinquents she's delivered her most beautiful and haunting work yet. There are paragraphs and sentences in this book so sharp, it feels like you picked up the wrong end of a scalpel.” —Stephen Markley, author of The Deluge

“‘I had two choices,’ Lisa Wells writes: ‘I could hide indoors and read, or I could bare my teeth and walk in the world. I chose both.’ Wise, wry, and burned clean by passing through the fire, in her new book she ranges from working minimum-wage food service jobs and checking the ashtray outside Target for butts not yet smoked down to the filter to her training as an EMT and teaching wilderness survival before studying Berryman and Keats and Auden at Iowa City, from her father’s wizard tattoo and her mother’s taped episodes of General Hospital to her own parenthood, with the best essay you’ll ever read about Whitesnake’s ‘Here I Go Again’ along the way, then out past all that, into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, and her sister’s death, and then further still, beyond words, into unspeakable fear. Lisa Wells, her teeth bared, is the writer we need now.” —J.D. Daniels, author of The Correspondence