Otoliths: When You Bit...

When You Bit... is the second full-length collection by Adam Fieled, now out from Otoliths.

When You Bit... can be purchased here.

The book is a sixty sonnet sequence, set in Chicago and Philadelphia. It takes the form of a triptych, and the three twenty-sonnet sections are: Sister Lovers, Dancing with Myself, and Two of Us. 

“Not all vampirism transpires on a grassy hill deep in the Carpathians. We may all, in fact, be vampires: blood-crazed, hungry, equipped with sharp teeth for a life-and-death struggle. The struggle is for love, in all of its myriad manifestations: physical, emotional, spiritual. In When You Bit…, Adam Fieled has crafted what may be the first post-avant sonnet cycle. It concerns these themes; how we feed on each other, consume each others’ vital resources, prey upon weaknesses to get those first teeth-marks in. In these sonnets, we see a sensibility equal parts Barrett Watten and Sir Philip Sidney; the post-avant impulse towards openness meeting a Renaissance-like ideal of courtly love, phenomenological inquiry, and good old-fashioned heartache. The goal, perpetually renewed in the text, is always the same: to make the reader complicit in attacks on frigidity and an embrace of the artfully carnal.”