Velvet Hounds: poems

By Aimee Seu

Velvet Hounds is a completely combustible collection of poetry. In extravagant, shape-shifting imagery and mythic-meets-black-leather vernacular, Seu takes readers on a journey through reckless youth, first love, addiction, bliss, agony and mayhem. Velvet Hounds is a semi-autobiographical collection bearing reckless witness, with nothing held back, to the wreckage bulimia nervosa makes of a body and spirit as well as the pain and personal schisms from which such a disorder might stem. In Velvet Hounds, Seu also delves into the difficulties of growing up the biracial, pansexual, wayfaring child of a deceased pastor and fundamentalist Christian writer mother. The book chronicles the effects of her mother's and her own wavering mental health and through that lens, the incoherent and dangerous labyrinth two people's psychosis can create when they collide. From impassioned, ecstatic, abstracted odes like G-Spot, “strongroom, throne room of baritone ache” & Clitoral “Sinewed capsule / of holy spirit. My body, / the electric chair / berserk.” To the clarity and searing vulnerability of narrative sequences like the long poem “Ox Hunger Essay” which chronicles different thresholds in the narrators struggle with death, betrayal, bulimia, and the isolation of identity “I developed a habit of wringing / my stomach out in my throat.” Never shying away from the erotic, visceral, nightmarish or any juiced-up phantasmagorical earthly heaven, Velvet Hounds is a thunderstorm you'll lose yourself inside.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Akron Press
• Release date: Mar 2, 2022
• ISBN: 9781629222233

Book preview

PART I

And as she slep, anonright tho hire mette

How that an egle, fethered whit as bon,

Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,

And out hire hert he rente, and that anon,

And dide his hert into hire brest to gon,

Of which she nought agroos, ne nothyng smerte;

And forth he fleigh, with herte left for herte.

—Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde

Book II, lines 925-931

I don’t mind livin’

I don’t mind givin’ it up.

—Grapetooth, Trouble

FAMILY PORTRAIT WITH CADILLAC ENGULFED IN FLAMES

My mother lost track of the time

playing in the kingdom of tall grass with me,

light passing incandescent through that swaying

frothing wheat. On the ride home

she flipped the tape over, sang

Nights in white satin, beauty I’d always missed

a mourning dove cooing as she carried

me up to bed. Days when we would cheer

if the car started. Women in the movies were

always cold, angelic collarbones begging you

to drape your jacket around them.

Love was a china doll my father

tied with string and let drag from the trunk

of his car as he went. Let dangle from the wing

of a plane. So I should’ve known better.

But in my heart, I already had a jacket I’d shrug off

to give anyone. In all my memories, he coughs

blood into tissues and shoves them deep

in his pockets. Looks at me knowing

we wouldn’t know each other.

Behind him, a Cadillac engulfed in flames.

At fifteen my brother was already an addict

robbing gas stations to buy cocaine—picture him,

black bandana tied over a face without stubble. To think

I was kicking him on the couch in my footsie pajamas.

My sister, cast in frigid diamond

every few seconds by the strobe light,

crystal embedded in her tongue that she used

to charm cobras, the word LOVE carved

into her arm with a box cutter. And while the gods

locked them in the garage and broke

hockey sticks over their shoulders,

I was talking to windowsill ladybugs.

Brother who snuck in to slip cash

into my mother’s purse after she kicked him out.

Bought a new car with blood money, torched

the old one and rolled it into the canyon.

We don’t sell for parts, he said. If I had

my own holiday we’d drag undercovers

out of their houses and burn them at the stake.

Because who could make a career of betrayal?

Grandmother, my heathen saint, smoking Virginia

Slims in a stained robe, in the sacred alcove

of TV light. It’s over now, and no one

will have ever seen you weep.

I like to laugh at the families in white button ups

and blue jeans kneeling in the reeds where a frail

dune fence trails off, they smile uneasily for the camera,

everyone holding each other in vain.

I know lovers are supposed to become family

but my mother’s love is a hard act to follow.

Who could ever be so desperate for me,

so absolute? She was either twisting

us daisy chain crowns in the baseball field

in the dew in the morning light, kissing

all of our names, or she was standing over

my bed in the night, floor a volcanic spill of candles,

trying to cast a demon out of my body

that I was born with, that’s never left.

What a pussy, my brothers say of pampered Paris

in a Hollywood remake of the mythic history,

prince favored unjustly by the gods. We watch

him fall stupidly through a gnashing battlefield

as brave men are shredded around him.

Like me passing through my youth somehow

unscathed. And now I come to you,