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Bottom Feeders
A vibrant and gritty debut from poet Arielle Hebert, Bottom Feeders is a queer coming-of-age collection set in late 2000s Florida, during the height of the opioid epidemic. Here, overdoses, red tide blooms, and hurricanes are as much a part of growing up as fleeting teenage desires, beach parties, and prom.
This is a landscape of glitter and grime, where young queer love is tested by the tides of addiction and recovery. The collection thrums with a sense of spectacle and surreality, accented by Sarasota’s history as a circus town and Florida’s deadly wildlife—alligators, needlefish, invasive snakes. The heat, humidity, and salt air of the Gulf become characters in their own right, as haunting as the love, grief, and loss found here. Despite the long shadows cast over these poems, there is beauty, friendship, chosen family, and hope in Bottom Feeders.
This is a landscape of glitter and grime, where young queer love is tested by the tides of addiction and recovery. The collection thrums with a sense of spectacle and surreality, accented by Sarasota’s history as a circus town and Florida’s deadly wildlife—alligators, needlefish, invasive snakes. The heat, humidity, and salt air of the Gulf become characters in their own right, as haunting as the love, grief, and loss found here. Despite the long shadows cast over these poems, there is beauty, friendship, chosen family, and hope in Bottom Feeders.
- GenresPoetry
82 pages, Paperback
Published June 16, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 1, 2026
Five stars for the affection I feel toward these stories and this story telling. Thank god for Warped Tour and Rilo Kiley making it into poems. Thank god for preliminary queer desire and how it drives us to take each other home!!!
These topics I’m so biased toward are written with craft and intention—sometimes the personal details felt a bit repetitive or dislocated, but considering this is a debut book, I didn’t mind too much.
“I Promise Not to Leave the Good Days Out,” “Cheap Magic,”and “My Mother Asks When I Am Moving Back to Florida” were my deep cuts. Fuck yeah some of us made it out and made art out of it all.
Thanks Black Lawrence for the galley!
These topics I’m so biased toward are written with craft and intention—sometimes the personal details felt a bit repetitive or dislocated, but considering this is a debut book, I didn’t mind too much.
“I Promise Not to Leave the Good Days Out,” “Cheap Magic,”and “My Mother Asks When I Am Moving Back to Florida” were my deep cuts. Fuck yeah some of us made it out and made art out of it all.
Thanks Black Lawrence for the galley!
June 15, 2026
This book was so, so good. Another top notch poetry collection out of NC State’s MFA.
I could have, like one of the blurbs says, read it in one sitting, but I wanted to let it sink in (so I read it in two sittings). It is organized really well—I don’t feel like the high energy bar that’s set with the opening poems (the titular piece and “Alligator Fight”) ever let up. Speaking of those two, it’s not at all surprising that, according to the acknowledgements, one is prizewinning and the other was runner-up.
I often find myself reading quickly through narrative poems because they’re very descriptive but maybe don’t do more beyond the narration. Hebert doesn’t ever fall into that trap—her style is very narrative, but she does a stellar job turning the stories into metaphors or tying them into something larger—none of them feel prosaic and they reward closer attention and rereading (“Magician’s Assistant,” “Mimosa Sundays,” “Python Challenge,” and more). Part of that are the line breaks, which I love but feel like is sometimes ignored in this style.
The significance of a short-lined, brief poem like “Needlefish,” whose form emulates the titular fish’s form, is expanded by its presence in this group of poems: all its elements accumulate new meanings because of its neighbors. “Black Nightgowns” is a more filled-out nature poem that ends with a wow of a description of a group of black vultures: “A fantasia of black / nightgowns flapping like children / escaped from their beds.”
I really like the narrator’s personal arc. There’s personal growth and reflection, neither romanticizing nor demonizing the past (both “Apology to my Past Self” and “I Promise to Not Leave the Good Days Out,” for example). It isn’t a one-note book—I feel like someone could have taken the first two poems and thought, “wow, these are stellar so I’m only going to write about the drugs and the parties.” However, the distance that the narrator gets from those (physical and emotional) highs creates many more layers. I think that “All I ever wanted was to be her getaway car” moved me the most, a lament for what could have been. “Clean” as well, how we do so many gymnastics to make it through our support of people who don’t love themselves as much as we love them. We’re not wallowing but neither are we discarding; we’re not excusing but neither are we belittling.
“Recovery is a room / you spend your life in, / thinking you have already left” (“Etymology of Recovery”).
This is a lean and mean, mature, well-rounded book. Pick it up.
I could have, like one of the blurbs says, read it in one sitting, but I wanted to let it sink in (so I read it in two sittings). It is organized really well—I don’t feel like the high energy bar that’s set with the opening poems (the titular piece and “Alligator Fight”) ever let up. Speaking of those two, it’s not at all surprising that, according to the acknowledgements, one is prizewinning and the other was runner-up.
I often find myself reading quickly through narrative poems because they’re very descriptive but maybe don’t do more beyond the narration. Hebert doesn’t ever fall into that trap—her style is very narrative, but she does a stellar job turning the stories into metaphors or tying them into something larger—none of them feel prosaic and they reward closer attention and rereading (“Magician’s Assistant,” “Mimosa Sundays,” “Python Challenge,” and more). Part of that are the line breaks, which I love but feel like is sometimes ignored in this style.
The significance of a short-lined, brief poem like “Needlefish,” whose form emulates the titular fish’s form, is expanded by its presence in this group of poems: all its elements accumulate new meanings because of its neighbors. “Black Nightgowns” is a more filled-out nature poem that ends with a wow of a description of a group of black vultures: “A fantasia of black / nightgowns flapping like children / escaped from their beds.”
I really like the narrator’s personal arc. There’s personal growth and reflection, neither romanticizing nor demonizing the past (both “Apology to my Past Self” and “I Promise to Not Leave the Good Days Out,” for example). It isn’t a one-note book—I feel like someone could have taken the first two poems and thought, “wow, these are stellar so I’m only going to write about the drugs and the parties.” However, the distance that the narrator gets from those (physical and emotional) highs creates many more layers. I think that “All I ever wanted was to be her getaway car” moved me the most, a lament for what could have been. “Clean” as well, how we do so many gymnastics to make it through our support of people who don’t love themselves as much as we love them. We’re not wallowing but neither are we discarding; we’re not excusing but neither are we belittling.
“Recovery is a room / you spend your life in, / thinking you have already left” (“Etymology of Recovery”).
This is a lean and mean, mature, well-rounded book. Pick it up.
June 23, 2026
This book broke me a little bit. It keeps you hovering right in the grey space between bitter heartbreak and glittering glimpses of hope. It’s about a girl trying to figure out her place in her city, in her identity, in the slow-moving ecological tragedy that is Florida, in her friendships and love affairs, and yes in the opioid crisis. It’s about watching people you love drown themselves when you’ve run out of life-vests to give them. The wordplay is stunning and the atmosphere is like smoking a stale cigarette while watching the sunset over the beach. It is beautiful and its words will stay with you for days to come.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
Bottom Feeders is honest, beautiful, and painful. Arielle Herbert’s poems feel like the summer after high school when everything becomes too real all at once. Herbert’s writing is how it feels to be drunk by the ocean in Florida. They’re how it feels to love and hate your home, how it feels to be a young lesbian in love, how it feels to love someone who’s sick to the point of making yourself sick. The feeling of being “two girls holding hands, slow dancing the robot in the waves, pressing our box faces together as the sun set”. Of feeling yourself be hidden behind doors and glass inside of yourself. Herbert’s writing reminded me to face the parts of myself that hurt and “tell her that I’m sorry, that she is safe here with me”. Black Nightgowns pulls together the images of despair and beauty depicted throughout Herbert’s poems. Vultures are made “a fantasia of black nightgowns flapping like children escaped from their beds”. I’m really looking forward to reading Herbert’s next book; this is a great and moving debut!
Review for Playbutch zine :)
Review for Playbutch zine :)
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews