FLORALIA
Sexual assault leaves an enduring mark on the psyche. While the body may heal swiftly or bear no visible traces of harm, the mind and emotions tell a different story. Neurological pathways are reshaped, and guilt and fear linger in the cells, preserving the memory of the intrusion. The trauma is compounded by the devastating reality that the perpetrator is often someone close to the victim, challenging deeply held notions of trust.
How does one process violence inflicted by a trusted family member, partner, friend, or acquaintance? There’s no simple answer. As Floralia illustrates, victims frequently find themselves under society’s microscope, scrutinized and displayed, forced to confront their pain and fears in isolation. Many seek refuge in people or substances that dull the pain but fail to truly care for their well-being.
Structured in three sections, the poems and radio play in Floralia delve into the pervasive impact of sexual abuse on the victim’s inner world and the societal voyeurism surrounding such narratives—a dynamic that deepens feelings of isolation. Offering an unflinching look into a survivor’s mind, Kimberly Ann Priest’s work captures the cyclical and deeply personal aftermath of trauma. Through a haunting and cinematic exploration of broken trust, she invites readers to confront the turbulence of survival and consider their role—as family, friend, partner, or acquaintance—in the life of someone who has endured such harm.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-963115-50-5
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Sexual assault leaves an enduring mark on the psyche. While the body may heal swiftly or bear no visible traces of harm, the mind and emotions tell a different story. Neurological pathways are reshaped, and guilt and fear linger in the cells, preserving the memory of the intrusion. The trauma is compounded by the devastating reality that the perpetrator is often someone close to the victim, challenging deeply held notions of trust.
How does one process violence inflicted by a trusted family member, partner, friend, or acquaintance? There’s no simple answer. As Floralia illustrates, victims frequently find themselves under society’s microscope, scrutinized and displayed, forced to confront their pain and fears in isolation. Many seek refuge in people or substances that dull the pain but fail to truly care for their well-being.
Structured in three sections, the poems and radio play in Floralia delve into the pervasive impact of sexual abuse on the victim’s inner world and the societal voyeurism surrounding such narratives—a dynamic that deepens feelings of isolation. Offering an unflinching look into a survivor’s mind, Kimberly Ann Priest’s work captures the cyclical and deeply personal aftermath of trauma. Through a haunting and cinematic exploration of broken trust, she invites readers to confront the turbulence of survival and consider their role—as family, friend, partner, or acquaintance—in the life of someone who has endured such harm.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-963115-50-5
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Sexual assault leaves an enduring mark on the psyche. While the body may heal swiftly or bear no visible traces of harm, the mind and emotions tell a different story. Neurological pathways are reshaped, and guilt and fear linger in the cells, preserving the memory of the intrusion. The trauma is compounded by the devastating reality that the perpetrator is often someone close to the victim, challenging deeply held notions of trust.
How does one process violence inflicted by a trusted family member, partner, friend, or acquaintance? There’s no simple answer. As Floralia illustrates, victims frequently find themselves under society’s microscope, scrutinized and displayed, forced to confront their pain and fears in isolation. Many seek refuge in people or substances that dull the pain but fail to truly care for their well-being.
Structured in three sections, the poems and radio play in Floralia delve into the pervasive impact of sexual abuse on the victim’s inner world and the societal voyeurism surrounding such narratives—a dynamic that deepens feelings of isolation. Offering an unflinching look into a survivor’s mind, Kimberly Ann Priest’s work captures the cyclical and deeply personal aftermath of trauma. Through a haunting and cinematic exploration of broken trust, she invites readers to confront the turbulence of survival and consider their role—as family, friend, partner, or acquaintance—in the life of someone who has endured such harm.
Poetry
ISBN: 978-1-963115-50-5
Publication Date: October 1, 2025
Praise for FLORALIA
Grief here is an inescapable weather—every moment has, if not the feel of rain, the smell. In a poetry that is as compassionate as it is beautiful, Priest shows us how even attempting to name a trauma is a nonlinear effort, a heart’s ongoing work.
—Chen Chen, author of Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency
“People do you know. [Survive.] Mostly women,” writes Kimberly Ann Priest in her expansive and often disquieting new collection Floralia. Her poems take risks in style and form that make them edgy and keen; and, despite the book’s difficult narrative of missing and exploited women, drug addiction, and the often-precarious struggle to survive, these risks make it a wonder to read. Presently, our culture is so anesthetized to violence that it’s easy to ignore or compartmentalize its terror and its hate. Floralia shakes us out of that complacency and demands we pay attention.
—Lynn Melnick, author of Refusenik and I’ve Had to Think Up a Way to Survive
In Floralia, Kimberly Ann Priest writes through the process of survival, what it takes for a person to live with trauma and all the real ways in which it manifests—art and casual sex, cutting and therapy, fear and a pair of comfortable shoes, social isolation and cultural shame. In this collection, we realize that no part of recovering is clean or easy. This is a must-read for fellow survivors.
—Erin Elizabeth Smith, Executive Director of Sundress Publications and author of Down
Like the eponymous flowers, the poems in Floralia oscillate, beautifully, between the familiar and strange, between the therapeutic and poisonous. It's unsettling and cinematic, as if, on the other side of these pages, someone was holding a showing of Hiroshima Mon Amour.
—Sam Cha, author of The Yellow Book
About Kimberly Ann Priest
Kimberly Ann Priest is the winner of the 2024 Backwaters Prize in Poetry for her book Wolves in Shelves (University of Nebraska Press) as well as the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress Publications), finalist for the American Best Book Awards, and tether & lung (Texas Review Press). A survivor of gendered violence and an active outdoorswoman, she has participated in initiatives to increase awareness concerning sexual assault, survivorship, and healing through nature and artistic expression. Winner of the 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared in literary journals such as Copper Nickel, Beloit Poetry Journal, Permafrost, and The Birmingham Poetry Review. Kimberly is an assistant professor of first-year writing at Michigan State University and volunteers at The Telling Room in Portland, Maine.
