Avery M. Guess received a 2015 NEA Fellowship for Poetry. She's a PhD student at USD, assistant editor for poetry at South Dakota Review, and Grant Program Manager at the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Recent publications include poems in diode, Rogue Agent, Glass, and Tinderbox, and creative non-fiction in Entropy and The Manifest-Station. Her debut her full-length poetry collection, The Truth Is, was published in April 2019 by Black Lawrence Press, and her chapbook, The Patient Admits, is available from dancing girl press.

Books by Avery M. Guess:

Other poems on the web by Avery M. Guess:
"How to Be a Survivor"
"The Patient's Aversion to Bananas Begins"
"The Deconstruction of e. e. cummings"
"The Patient Admits"

Avery M. Guess's Website.

Avery M. Guess on Twitter.

About The Truth Is:

"Perhaps you think you have a sense of what it is to be a survivor. Or perhaps, like me, you are one. But let me tell you: no familiarity with trauma will prepare you for the singular world of Avery M. Guess' book, steeped as it is in a Florida childhood of Spanish moss and sea cucumbers, armadillos and bats, the whole place hurricane-wrecked, reeking of marine debris, the flooded carpet replaced by a bright red shag in which a father creeps across to his daughter's bed at night. Here you have not a story of recovery but the day-by-day blast of fire it takes to choose life, or more accurately, to reclaim a body that's been heisted, so much so that to feel anything a return to the body's animal self is the only thing that works—sometimes by cutting but also by slipping into the skin of an alligator or growing antlers where her mother's nails broke off in her scalp. Reader, I swear to you—no book, not since I first found Sharon Olds or Linda McCarriston or Rachel McKibbens—has scorched my heart with such furious beauty."
—Nickole Brown

"The Truth Is— an astonishingly powerful debut collection by Avery M. Guess—holds the multiple facets of trauma up to the light with a piercing, rainbowed clarity. These are poems that sensitively unfold legacies of childhood sexual abuse and mental illness with fierce candor, while simultaneously performing the magical alchemies of transforming pain into riveting art. Linguistically taut, and imagistically deft, these lovely and harrowing poems linger and haunt. If you are a survivor, this is a book that will make you feel seen. If you are not a survivor, this is a book that will help you to see. Avery M. Guess is a stunning poet with a gorgeous talent, and a generously capacious heart."
—Lee Ann Roripaugh