I'll Take My Body To-Go

Kindall Fredricks' debut collection, I’ll Take My Body To-Go, begins by following a rattling hive of girls who came of age in the early 2000s. This is a book about girls who burn at the belly like a shot tin can. Girls who feel freshly peeled, ugly, and certain they’ve been cheated of something, they’re just not sure of what yet. Girls who wing their eyeliner as fiercely as an oath. Girls who can “find the nape of anything” and dig their name into the bark of their world by being as loud and as defiant as possible.

With brazen reverence, Fredricks does not shy from illuminating the trauma of their lived experiences, which are a rejection of the wax-paper world of girlhood that is so often portrayed―together, they flick the ashes of amen to the dirt, shoplift cheap wine from gas stations, and hunt for any escape from the everyday violence girls are expected to endure. I’ll Take My Body To-Go is about girls who listened, women who are listening still.

Kindall Fredricks is a practicing registered nurse and poet who received her MFA from Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared in Passages North, Boulevard, New Letters, Grist, North American Review, and more. She lives with her daughter, husband, and collective of furballs just outside Houston, Texas.