Origin Stories by Brigitte Lewis

Our newest chapbook, Origin Stories by Brigette Lewis, has just been released and is available to order. Kerry Neville, author of Remember to Forget Me and Necessary Lies, had the following to say about Lewis's work:

“I read Origin Stories with enormous pleasure from the first to the last sentence. Origin Stories is an intimate, ambitious and witty collection that delves into the tangled domestic lives of famous Biblical couples: Adam and Eve (wife #2), Lot and Edith, David and Bathsheba, Samson and Delilah, and Adam (again) and Lilith (wife #1). In ‘Adam + Eve + Eukaryotes,’ the first story of the collection, Adam asks Eve, ‘Don’t you think we’re in this story together?’ This double-negative query reveals Adam’s hope for Eve’s easy reassurance. After all, she is born of his rib so forever of his body. Eve, however, cryptically responds, ‘I know who I am.’ This brief Q & A echoes across this collection. I love the surprising and satisfying way these stories interrogate our mythical and mundane meet-cute beginnings, where men are ‘raised to be earthquakes’ and women are ‘raised to be split.’ The author is acutely observant of how we have been shaped and misshaped by our desires and shame, fidelities and infidelities, and independence and interdependence since our first self-conscious naked longings for each other.”

Several writers wrote blurbs for Origin Stories, far too many for us to fit on the cover, but we've included them all here.

“How do we escape the cyclical haunting of ancient structures? What battle was waged between the feminine and masculine that still causes the earth to quake and split? In these oddly brave shorts, I am suspended between a familiar tale and its search for a new exegesis––that is the permission to transform a poison into medicine we may drink on the sly. Not in order to survive but in order to remember “violence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.” Exquisite storytelling inside the eye of poetry.”—Yanara Friedland, author of Uncountry: A Mythology and Abraq ad Habra: I will Create As I Speak.

“You’ll imagine this, won’t you – Lilith leaning forward to recite something atomic, vivid, sudden, poetic.” So ends Origin Stories, on a note that makes you want to return to the beginning and read again. Brigitte Lewis restores lust, love, physics, and honey to Biblical couplings, making mythic characters utterly new and deeply human. This is a smart debut, as innovative as it is irreverent.”—Beth Alvarado, author of Jillian in the Borderlands and Anxious Attachments.

“In the stories of Brigitte Lewis the sacred and the profane refuse tidy categories and instead erupt into messy, humorous, and profound elucidations about what it means to be in a body that loves other bodies. Here are stories that work like alchemy works—the mythical past and the uncertain present conjunct in an invitation to see ourselves anew.”—Selah Saterstrom, author of Ideal Suggestions and Slab.

We are so excited to be able to offer our newest chapbook, Origin Stories, available for order now. If you want to pick a copy, visit our shop here.