Slick Like Dark

Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award

“Subtle and provocative, the poems in Slick Like Dark are motivated by history’s forgetfulness. As the book unfolds, we are asked to consider this silence as both power and disempowerment, as calculated withholding and a slow ‘surrender.’ Here, Wade offers us– with intelligence, grace, and incredible skill– an excavation of all that has been buried ‘in broad daylight,’ a ‘record’ pulled from the ‘thicket’s fire.’ Yet these poems are most beautiful in their restlessness, in their movement between ‘light’ and a ‘violent fanfare,’ and in their willingness to inhabit the most liminal and uncertain ethical territories. This is a brave and powerful book.”

—Kristina Marie Darling, Snowbound Award judge

About the Author

Meg Wade has been a National Poetry Series finalist and a Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin’s Creative Writing Institute. She received her MFA from the University of Arizona and has been the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and a full residency from the New York Summer Writer’s Institute. Her poems have been widely published and anthologized. She lives and writes in Nashville, Tennessee.

Advanced Praise

“There are many floods in Meg Wade’s Slick Like Dark, and these floods and floodings are both disasters to survive and the means of survival, the outpouring of overpowering emotions such as love and the dark space between love and vengeance, sex and killing. Wade writes, ‘If something is beautiful // it’s fighting.’ Her work has a way of setting up multiple scenes, reading sometimes like a religious service or a trial where the accused is in the shadows. Sexual and whodunit actions become highlights of a dusky narrative that maintains mystery and darkness throughout its unfolding and telling. As a collection, Slick Like Dark doesn’t really ask who is slick because everyone is suspect including the tortured self. Survival is attributed to struggle, how one overcomes abuse while celebrating sexuality or balancing a religious upbringing. With a biblical and cinematic lyric, Meg Wade spills out a redemptive space that encompasses a new thick freedom.” —Farrah Field

“In Meg Wade’s Slick Like Dark we learn what we make to take a body back, and all of the questions I am asking myself now are part of that reclamation—is desire a miracle? Does god belong in a body? These poems are astonishing. They have pleasure and a rage that burns clean, images that startle and spark, lines that turn and contain. I could warm myself by the heat in these pages.” —Traci Brimhall

“We can’t comprehend shadows cast on us by others’ actions without first confronting our own darknesses, our craving for light. An alchemy of figurative language gives us deer ‘hooves slick like dark / orchids’: in the title phrase, death yields new life. But life can be fickle and confrontational, a voice both demanding love and pushing love away. Come to these pages to understand the litany of ‘all the things I can carry: / a mirror, a matchbook, my own // muddy voice howling bleached acoustics.’ Hunker down and holler. ‘Toss rocks at the fried chicken sign to knock the neon out’—a phrase taken from the musical, compelling poem ‘Arrested Empire.’ In this stunning chapbook, Meg Wade explores the complications of what it means to survive.” —Sandra Beasley, author of Count the Waves

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-946482-31-0