The Great Scissor Hunt

In The Great Scissor Hunt, Jessica K. Hylton showcases emotions on the edge. This is a collection full of turbulent inner dialogue-a war within the poet's mind-stuck straddling the fence between lust and love, forgiveness and hate, grand images and mundane trivialities of daily life, and an intense, almost childlike longing for home, coupled with an overpowering desire for adventure and the unknown. These emotions are presented raw and uncensored, and are woven together with sharp humor and skeptical nostalgia. The characters we meet are flawed and often unreliable, moving with uncertainty through their relationships. As readers, we are left not only questioning the nature of our desires, but the ways in which we came to those desires in the first place.

-Jess Hager

"[T]here's something/Intoxicating about the taste of skin/Designed to peel away," Jessica K. Hylton writes in her incisive collection of poems, The Great Scissor Hunt, poems that seek language for the excess of bodies and the excess of loves that are "not written in the skies/But scarred into wrists." Inevitably, language fails these bodies and sensations, but instead of conceding their unrepresentability, Hylton's poems limn and lineate them. They give form to nights "with too much/Alcohol and not enough sleep," and they give voice to the "razor blade wielding confessionalists" of this collection who, instead of merely peeling and peering below the skin, crave and carve with "unrestrained/Lust," with the honest hunger of women who refuse to be denied their own bodies-or each other's.

-Billie R. Tadros

Jessica K. Hylton's confessionalist collection, The Great Scissor Hunt, is both honest and frank as each piece gives you a thrill like peeking in through the window to see those intimately tense moments between the poet-incurably lovesick and incredibly cynical-and her lovers-blissfully manic and void of all empathy. Unnoticed from the sill, the reader slips into synesthesia at the visceral and inventive ways the strangers move. The characters you meet as you flip through the pages are captured in unforgettable snapshots, tied to a moment, to the wrong thing they said, the expectation they never lived up to, or the incredible sex they used to have.

-Sami Richardson