Winner, 2023 Writers’ League of Texas Book Award for Poetry
“SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, Mag Gabbert’s first book, tells two origin stories. One is about Gabbert: her childhood firsts, adolescent middles, and every ingredient in her ‘Recipe for Quiet Ferocity.’ The other is about language, Gabbert’s unruly medium, each word aswarm with connotations and near-synonyms.…Gabbert’s intertwined narratives give nothing precedence, lending equal credence to favorite poets’ best lines and the so-called lower senses—taste, touch, and smell. Her distinctive emotional hues are not primary colors but gradients and swirlings—proud masochism, inappropriate laughter, unplaceable heat.” —Christopher Spaide, Poetry Foundation
“SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS startles with its immediate power. Smart, open, funny, sad, brilliantly wounded, ferociously kind, and ultimately hopeful, Mag Gabbert announces herself as a new force in American poetry.” —Matthew Zapruder
“Mag Gabbert’s voice is a knockout. These poems transform sexual objectification into powerful, passionate erotic subjectivity, and we need that erotic joy. Dazzling.” —Brenda Shaughnessy
“Gabbert’s poems leap off the page, fueled by nerve, passion, dazzling research, and one grief after another. Need drives her to question what it means to be a human, and a powerful poetic gift keeps spinning its answers into scorching music ‘like so many / sunbursts on the tongue.’ I love this book.” —Timothy Donnelly
“The triumphs of SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS are in language which renders desire, fury, pain, intimacy, and wonder as revolutionary spaces. Caged or uncaged, the poem is itself an animal, that ‘grief, without context,’ which brims with the wild beauty of defiance, of reconciliation, of agony that escapes, finally, into tenderness.” —Chelsea Dingman
In SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS, Mag Gabbert redefines the bestiary in fiery, insistent, and resistant terms. These poems recast the traumas of her adolescence while charting new paths toward linguistic and bodily autonomy as an adult. Using dreamlike, shimmering imagery, she pieces together a fractured portrait of femininity—one that electrifies the confessional mode with its formal play and rich curiosity. Gabbert examines the origin of shame, the role of inheritance, and what counts as a myth, asking, “What’s the opposite of a man? / A woman? A wound? The devil’s image?”
Read an excerpt from SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS on Poetry Daily.
SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS featured in Electric Lit’s “7 Poetry Collections About Transformation.”
“A chiseled, yet tender self-portrait … SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS leaves you with a strong sense of [Gabbert’s] fierce yet careful voice … Without doubt, I look forward to more Gabbert’s work.” —G.H. Mosson, Heavy Feather Review
“SEX DEPRESSION ANIMALS is a brilliant depiction of the messiness of a life well-lived and lessons well-earned. … The collection is a gift from a gifted poet—a ‘recipe for quiet ferocity’ that will be enjoyed and again.” —Jen Schneider, Mad Poets Society
“Blending myth, dream, and realism, Gabbert reimagines the bestiary as a catalog of unexpected monsters and wondrous transformations. These fierce, vibrant poems center womanhood in all its messiness and ask tangled questions about desire, power, femininity, memory, and bodily autonomy.” —Laura Sackton, BuzzFeed News, “13 Recent Poetry Collections To Pick Up If You’re Trying To Get Into Poetry”
Mag Gabbert has received a Discovery Award from 92NY’s Unterberg Poetry Center and fellowships from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Paris Review Daily,Pleiades,Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. She teaches at Southern Methodist University.
Contents
I
Steam
Ship
Lake
Wedding
David
Blue
Toilet
Gun
Lace
Bathtub
Constellation
Gum
Pink
II
Crack
Sleep
Dark Matter
Tattoo
Anniversary
Bone
Death
Baby
Figment
Trick
Fever
June
America
Ghost
III
The Breakup
IV
Rat
Oyster
Pigeon
Egg
Cat
Bee
Girl
Bat
Rabbit
Rhinoceros
Dolphin
Orangutan
Goat
V
Recipe for Quiet Ferocity
Acknowledgments
Notes
