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In this poignant collection, Amber Decker explores themes of rediscovering self-love and trust after the storm of trauma and grief has dashed one's inner world to pieces."Look at how the sunsinks like a black boatbetween the mountains, howit paints the snow with flame,how it ferries you like a frozen queento the other side of daylightsilent as every death you've escapedon little cat feet ..."

Amber Decker's Inevitable Wreckage shows up to a knife fight with a flamethrower. The speaker in one poem says, "I am afraid to write this poem. I / am afraid to not write this poem." This is a book of necessary truths, "that a lover could kill the good in you / with a knife made of silence," that a violent thunderstorm "leaves behind a sky as blue / and seamless as an unbroken robin's egg" that, "to ask out loud / for love / does not mean you / are broken." Decker is our Sylvia Plath, our Anne Sexton. We should all be reading every single word she writes. Shaindel Beers, author of A Brief History of Time and The Children's War and Other Poems

The poems in Amber Decker's "The Girl Who Left You" deliver love and lust on the spot, demanding us to immediately pull over to the side of the road and catch our breath. They are moving, visceral snapshots of a poet's life when she bares all and declares: "that next morning / we wore our bruises / proud as prizefighters." When Amber brings us storms over her landscape, we shake deep inside. When she seduces us, we fall for it. And when she leaves us for good, we never forget it, just like her poems.

To be a woman-to be loved, loathed, sheltered, shunned, worshiped, feared, sexualized, objectified, gratified, brutalized, glorified, silenced, empowered... With a startling lyrical clarity, Amber Decker helps us navigate the road that twists endlessly through the forest of womanhood, illuminating the mystery and the duality of growing up female and what it means to form relationships as a woman, to love and be loved, to fantasize, to have the heart shattered and to rise up from the ashes once more like the phoenix, stronger than before and without so much as a hair out of place, all while struggling to find a place in this world and, quite possibly, in the next.

Every act we take up is political. When we decide whether we'd like to do something or say "hell with it, I'm not doing it," we occupy a radical chasm of biopower. The authors in this volume offer reflections on the minutiae of the everyday. Those moments when we can choose to go forth or walk out. Poets, especially, subvert the automatic when they use their habit of attention. The auto-life is what causes poor policies to proliferate. Only acts of questioning, defecting, and ultimately, dissent will bring us to a place where we are actively seeking justice for all.

An Anthology of the regions finest Poets & Writers by WVArts.

horror, adj: inspiring or creating loathing, aversion, etc.sleaze, adj: contemptibly low, mean, or disreputabletrash, n: literary or artistic material of poor or inferior qualityWelcome to the inaugural issue of HST Quarterly, the curated collection from Horror, Sleaze and Trash.