"To enter Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan's fifth full-length poetry collection, is to buckle into a whirlwind. Part self-reckoning, part spell, part enchantment, this is a book that speaks as easily of the real-life repo man as it does a forest of magical nopales. Through lyric, narrative, and many experimental forms, Givhan confronts misogyny, poverty, and generational trauma. ...Praise for Jenn Givhan, who sees all the muck and misery, winds it into startling, incantatory music, and nonetheless persists."--Emily Pérez, Rhino Poetry

"I've just read your new poetry book, Belly to the Brutal (Wesleyan University Press, July 2022), and I feel like it's been inhabiting me in the days since. In some ways I identify deeply with your subjects: you write about parenting, adjunct teaching, and the precarious feeling of being a woman and mother in our time."--Rachel Richardson, Adroit Journal

"In Belly to the Brutal, Jennifer Givhan explores the questions of gender, language, and motherhood. These are precarious and gorgeous poems, stylistically varied and image-drenched--a speaker who's an adjunct teacher living in her car, a mother who discovers an unexplained bruise on her daughter's arm and seeks its source, the little-known Mexican woman painter who inspired Frida Kahlo. With the dark humor of a good witch, Givhan offers the 'hallelujah hellflowering' we've been needing."--Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

"Belly to the Brutal is a collection of raw and mystical materialism in its exploration of motherhood's continuum: from creation to destruction. The frankness is profound and inspiring, the lyric voice lucid. Givhan gets at the eros and terror of being mother through a harrowing excavation into her body's history. Her poems remind me of Frida Kahlo's flayed and ecstatic self-portraits. I love this book with my salt."--Carmen Giménez Smith, author of Be Recorder