Prayer for Relief

With her first full-length poetry collection, Krystle May Statler introduces us to the interplay of form and language to unravel what is otherwise shapeless. Drawing from her experience in the aftermath of her older brother's murder by the Inglewood Police Department in 2019, the poems act as tentacles, reaching out for sense of the nonsensical. Statler asks the reader to bear witness, to consider a body after it is no longer a body, to survive alongside her in this now brotherless life. Prayer for Relief is grief poetics searching for closeness as tensions of banality and language refract a life of estrangement, that once felt temporary and is now permanent.