MEAT
MEAT (Little Red Leaves, 2015).
Out of print
"In Sophie Seita’s Meat, the witty rigors of the dainty butcher and are butchered (the product of femininity both cleaver and carcass seemingly destined to be sectioned into retail-ready portions). In the racialized and gendered economy of our atmospherically fractured colonial violence, you get you a piece of meat so sweet. Or not. Seita folds us in through the discourses we’ve been eaten by."
— Laura Elrick
“How do you translate the sound of a slaughtered animal screaming? What can you say in response to it? It’s in the gory domain of questions like those that Sophie Seita’s remarkable MEAT arrives. By addressing itself to whatever is forbidden the justice of response, MEAT is a long song of the double wound of victimhood—an originary violence followed by the structurally denied ability to speak of one’s being wronged. With Seita’s intelligence, incredible ear, and engaged life as a reader, she distributes her sources and resources musically. This book is melancholy and in precisely the right balance, but is always filled with extraordinary care: “I want to say things and feel them / this weak attempt at telling / not a verdict / just an expanse of caress.””
— Brandon Brown
Press:
Review by Sarah Hayden: in HIX EROS (2016)
Review by Eleanor Perry on Meat in Tripwire 13: Dialogues (September 2017), pp. 241-244.
Review in Galatea Resurrects (2018)
Review by Joseph Persad, ‘deeply clueless: consuming Sophie Seita’s Meat’, Tears in the Fence, 65 (Winter/Spring 2017)