WALK LIKE CHEW, by Olivia Winifred Lhundup-Zebo

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

Here is a recount of my wonder and shame.

WALK LIKE CHEW is a devotion; to indulge in the tangible and invisible. To soften, to nestle in, to sit down in the mud and delight.

All of the terrible and beautiful things I am are here. This small collection was written at the very beginning of my twenties. Each poem crystallizes memory, image, emotion. Some are best read aloud, some are silent. I don’t mind whichever you choose.

Here I have turned (momentarily) away from asking why we exist, and towards composing a pleasant existence.

Olivia Winifred Lhundup-Zebo is a genderqueer writer, fiber artist, and musician living in Portland Maine. Their poem “As I Knit” received 2nd place in the Grenfell Poetry Contest held by the University of Maine in Orono in 2021. This is their first chapbook. Olivia would like very much to build a tiny house somewhere, maybe by a meadow on the edge of the woods, grow a garden and raise chickens. They have chased and chewed these poems to no end. It is never enough, and so the writing continues.