“Inès Pujos’s book is very pregnant and raggedy. I like it like I liked Lars Van Triers ‘Nymphomaniac I & II.’ It’s medieval but darker like if a painter explained how he liked to cook — using skulls. So cavalier but with these tiny blots of light. Plus she builds her poems with these good, great, organic lists that are never corny cause she’s seriously counting things in the world.” —Eileen Myles, Lambda Book Award Winner, Guggenheim awardee, and author of I Must Be Living Twice and Inferno, among many others.



“Inès Pujos’s Something Dark to Shine In fluently scales the spectrum of human emotion, interlacing personal and cosmic mythologies. These poems are primordial, modern, sage, urgent. Pujos collapses worlds as easily as she creates them with the magic and reverence of an occult ritual—the smell of death, a ride on a crystal elephant, hundreds of pink crucifixes. Pujos is unabashed in her hungers, pleading ‘I want you to bite me here’ and ‘Can’t I crave something else today?’ The poems of Something Dark to Shine In are arteries pumping essential desires. ‘It makes / me dizzy, how blood rushes to the surface’: woozy and determined, Pujos paints over the old town square, nightmares, throats until they become relics, rubies, raspberries.”

—Adèle Barclay, author of Renaissance Normcore and If I Were in a Cage I’d Reach Out For You.



“Frida Kahlo would have loved Something Dark to Shine In, Inès Pujos’ magnificent debut poetry collection, a provocative and sensory book that is nothing short of a lifeline. Pujos introduces us to a speaker who knows what it is ‘To tell and not be believed,’ yet endures and transforms, calling upon the material world’s tactility—with velvet, orchids, porcelain, pollen, pink crucifixes, veils, sea salt, gasoline, and gold dust, she constructs a place where we can both escape and return to the world while protected from future suffering. The hands in these poems are painted red; they dig, collect wings, and construct a crown, or search for lightning to crack open. Like Kahlo’s paintings, Pujos’ poems have the aura of anguish and sublimity; one poem is a self-portrait in which an Inès sits on the roof of city hall ‘reading tarot for the handless.’ Reading this book feels like putting on armor, or considering, palms open, what is promised other than death." —Madeleine Barnes author of You Do Not Have to Be Good