BOOKS

Inside Out Egg

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Inside Out Egg is a book full of a rough humor that feels necessary for our survival. Each poem contains the whole unbound strangeness of the human experience–the offhand remark, the blur of being in a body– all of this is written with a humility and understated wit that both growls and sings. Rahija is a gleaming and idiosyncratic voice for our chaotic times.

—Ada Limón, 24th Poet Laureate of the United States

What spell or curse allowed these small poems to hold in their elastic shells our shared sense of malaise, indignity, & absurdity but also our capacity for wonder, humor, revelation, & desire?

—Kristen Renee Miller, director and editor-in-chief at Sarabande Books, translator of Heating the Outdoors by Marie-Andrée Gill.

What a gift it is to laugh while living inside a book of poems. Simultaneously hilarious, tender, and playfully pessimistic, Inside Out Egg dances on the edge of the end-times and beckons from ‘the coast of love.’ In these poems we so acutely feel the ‘holiness of quail eggs,’ and too, feel the sacrilege of a river forced to flow under city sewer grates. And though these poems often hum with a rare levity, Rahija gifts us lessons we cannot afford to miss. I, for one, will never again ‘complain about the snow,’ as who knows which snow could be the last.

—Kayleb Rae Candrilli, PEW Fellowship, Whiting Award, and NEA Fellowship recipient, and author of Water I Won’t Touch (Copper Canyon, 2021)

Rahija’s poems are, at first glance, fun and weird, clever and tender. From the clickbait series of ‘Breaking News’ poems to Michael Myers’ new narrative in ‘Halloween: Ends’, Inside Out Egg is a funhouse mirror set to reflect and distort the absurdities of late-stage capitalism, pop culture, and gender roles. But in these poems there is also a heart: loneliness and mental health, heartbreak and horniness, cave creatures and birds, all packaged perplexingly in an inside out egg

—Danni Quintos, author of Two Brown Dots (BOA Editions), winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Prize