This smart, racy collection of poems from Francesca Kritikos is a portrait in severity, resignation, provocation. Francesca’s control and dominance over the line is a marvel. Like Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher, or Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, the speaker(s) in Kritikos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous follow in a lineage of women who get exactly what they don’t want. —Ben Fama, author of If I Close My Eyes, Fantasy and Deathwish

Francesca Kritikos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous is like a hymnal written by a disaffected god; one who moves through our world in the disguise of a supplicant—particularly around unnamed men. The puppet master in the role of the “pretty puppet”. As such, Kritikos shifts between the register of the earthbound (You’re lucky / I’m not used to being free) and the omniscient (I will tell as much of the truth / as you can handle), as deftly and quickly as fruit goes from unripe to decay. Each poem enacts a search for that brief moment of ripeness. Of perfection that is not of the flesh. The search is often brutal, as Kritikos unflinchingly asks us to examine our own appetites—not just for the food we consume, but for blood, for money, for drugs, anything that helps us forget that in the end it’s all waste. It’s also exquisite. Something that once you’ve tasted you’ll never forget. —Meghann Boltz, author of True Romance

These poems come from the bruise of the fruit. —Lamb

Like “tearing a grape / off its vine,” Francesca Kritkos’ The season of lilacs is monstrous weeps a sticky lyric fluid that coats the experience of “learn[ing] to talk / at the end of privacy.” Kritkos’ disciplined, volatile poems expose the intensity and ambivalence of the flesh: skin under snow, fresh rot on a pink fingernail, “cake / cum / blood.” Herein, an unquiet imagination, and a central question, or a wish: “if fasting didn’t work / if God wasn’t right about us.” —Leah Flax Barber, author of The Mirror of Simple Souls

I have not read a book I have loved as much as The season of lilacs is monstrous in a very long time. Francesca Kritikos is the definition of an excellent writer, one who isn't afraid to explore every aspect of herself to express the moment. Kritikos is a master at being honest with herself and it shows, the poetry is raw and gorgeous. —Erin Taylor, author of Bimboland