Join us to celebrate the launch of Shilo Niziolek’s new book of poetry! She will be joined by Catherine Broadwell.
On the heels of her memoir, Fever, Niziolek's debut poetry collection, Atrophy, continues pulling even further at the same threads: desire, grief, trauma, love, and illness. However, in Atrophy, the primary beast that stalks these pages is the body in isolation, the body in decay, the body as animalistic and wounded and deadly in its pursuit of living. Atrophy has all the promise of a young poet and all the grit of a grown woman who has repeatedly clawed her way through the dirt.
Shilo Niziolek has written Fever (2022), A Thousand Winters In Me (2022), I Am Not An Erosion: Poems Against Decay (2022), and Atrophy (forthcoming Sept 2023 Querencia Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Juked, Honey Literary, West Trade Review, Entropy, Pork Belly Press, and Phoebe Journal among others. Shilo is a writing instructor at Clackamas Community College and is the editor and co-founder of the literary magazine, Scavengers. She is a queer disabled writer who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her partner and their pit bull. Find her on Instagram and twitter @shiloniziolek
Catherine Broadwall (formerly known as Catherine Kyle) is the author of Water Spell (Cornerstone Press, 2025), Fulgurite (Cornerstone Press, 2023), Shelter in Place (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), and other collections. Her writing has appeared in Bellingham Review, Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, and other journals. She was the winner of the 2019-2020 COG Poetry Award and a finalist for the 2021 Mississippi Review Prize in poetry. She is an assistant professor at DigiPen Institute of Technology, where she teaches creative writing and literature.
Named for the glassy, maze-like structures that can form underground when lightning strikes sand, Fulgurite weaves together reality and myth. Informed by fairy tales, domestic fabulism, and environmental concerns, the book examines gender on large and small scales. Patriarchal influences in domestic spaces are compared to patriarchal influences on national and global levels, and identity is made complex by the fusion of survival, dissociation, and promise. The collection bears witness to the grief of the everyday while simultaneously pursuing hope.
