Fleshgraphs

BRYNNE REBELE-HENRY was born in 1999. Her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, The Volta, So to Speak, Verse, and Adroit, among other publications. She has received numerous honors for her work, including the Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Award from the Poetry Society of America. She lives in Richmond, Virginia.

“A visceral engagement with the politics and poetics of girlhood by a 14-year-old author, these lyrical experimental, satirical prose fragments enact a potent exploration of queerness, girlhood, and illness against a backdrop of Internet and rape culture.”—Publishers Weekly“Grasping one’s sense of selfhood is dependent on the selves around us and the way we project ourselves on other human beings, consciously or not. These other beings may also constitute themselves as mirrors that are, more often than not, cracked and not exactly self-flattering. Becoming and staying self-aware, whatever this might mean, becomes a strenuous exercise, a quite dizzying one that may also lead you to conclude that one’s self is more likely to be an iridescent illusion that guarantees dissatisfaction and anxiety, especially when one is expected to conform to certain social conventions and identify herself accordingly. In the rather short but high-pitched Fleshgraphs, Brynne Rebele-Henry rejects any such easy detectable self in favor of a collection of kaleidoscopic selves, by using her own body as an organic archive of episodes, but also as a filter that might end up clogging every once in a while. It’s the bodily reactions to the things happening to her that define each of these somewhat residual selves that ride out any self-conscious censor to tell the story while also giving a new meaning to it.”—Minor Literatures