EARLY PRAISE FOR BESTIAL MOUTHS

  Bestial Mouths by Brenda S. Tolian claws at the edges of sanity, tearing into the raw sinew of human transformation. Each poem is a dark ritual of flesh, bone, and blood-soaked desire. Tolian leads us through the shadowy depths of Skinwalker Moon, where skin and soul unravel under the Sangre de Cristo skies, and into the earth’s devouring hunger in Eros Root, where roots twist around buried secrets. This collection is not for the faint-hearted—its lines pulse with feral intensity, binding readers to a dark magic both horrific and beautiful. Every verse is an invocation, drawing you deeper into the beast within. Bestial Mouths does not just ask to be read, it demands to be felt, to be devoured, until nothing remains but bone and breathless awe.

—Shane Hawk, co-editor of the Best Selling Never Whistle at Night franchise

In Bestial Mouths, Brenda S. Tolian reaches back to folklore and myth, embraces rhyme and narrative, wordplay and irony, and draws on anatomy and geology in service of creating poetry that terrifies and engages, repels and stimulates, her language turning most beautiful when it most frightens. If you have found yourself googling any of the following—serial killers; the creepiness of teeth; the perspective from beneath ground; female rage—Brenda S. Tolian’s Bestial Mouths is your must-read. These poems do what writing should do: make you want to close the book and reread—as a simultaneous impulse.

—-Lori Ostlund, Author of After the Parade & The Bigness of the World, Series Editor of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction, New story ("Just Another Family") in New England Review (2023) & BASS 2024

 This collection is cigarettes and centipedes. It’s men under lurid light posts and missing girl posters. Truly, a dark delight.

—-Erika T. Wurth, author of WHITE HORSE

Already an accomplished prose writer, Brenda Tolian’s poetry collection, Bestial Mouths, is an astonishing artistic achievement. She writes beautiful words that tell us terrible things; fever dreams portending our deepest truths.

 —Jon Bassoff, author of Beneath Cruel Waters 

Bestial Mouths by Brenda S. Tolian-An Alice in Wonderland mushroom trip—part psilocybin, part nightshade—careening down an unsettling poetic labyrinth that alternates between caresses and stabbings, lips and fangs, perfume and poison. Like learning that your lover is a serial killer but you won’t leave because you’re enjoying every depraved moment together. 

—Mario Acevedo, author of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats

Tolian’s Bestial Mouths grabs by the handfuls the soil, the mountains, hell, the root of a narrative controlling women while also erasing our existence. Burdened, buried, beloved—Tolian demands the reader as a witness: a knock in the trunk, popped two inches wide/watery blink of emaciated eye/this is where the girls go when they disappear/on the road in the night/with no one to hear. There is no looking away from the powerful imagery and the pain cradled within as Tolian creates within her world an incantation of reclamation.

—Hillary Leftwich, author of Ghosts Are Just Strangers Who Know How to Knock and Aura.