Plucking the Stinger

A girl rides on an outgrown tricycle, biting a necklace of candy hearts. A woman sleeps with a bullet under her tongue. In these vivid and crushing poems, despair has a scent and it’s “half perfume, half something rotten.” Wild with loss and obsession, the poems of “Plucking the Stinger” throb like medication in the throat, a ballet interrupted by a couple breaking up, a false positive test, the terrible death of someone dear. This book is a love letter to grief with no return address.

STEPHANIE ROGERS’S poems have appeared in journals such as Pleaides, Ploughshares, Southern Review, New Ohio Review, and Third Coast, among others. Three of her poems were selected for inclusion in the emerging writers anthology Best New Poets (2013, 2009, 2006). She currently works as a medical editor for a pharmaceutical advertising agency.