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prey
Poetry. In her third book, PREY, Jeanann Verlee examines predatory relationships from childhood onward. Drawing parallels between human and non-human predators, the poems collected here strive to illuminate the trauma of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse--exploring what it is to become prey.
100 pages, Paperback
Published August 1, 2018
2 people are currently reading
123 people want to read
About the author
Jeanann Verlee
11 books109 followers Jeanann Verlee is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of three books: prey, finalist for the Benjamin Saltman Award (Black Lawrence, 2018); Said the Manic to the Muse (Write Bloody, 2015); and Racing Hummingbirds, silver medal winner in the Independent Publisher Awards (Write Bloody, 2010). She is a recipient of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize, and her poems and essays appear in a number of journals, including Adroit, BOAAT, BuzzFeed, VIDA, and Muzzle. She has served as poetry editor for Winter Tangerine Review and Union Station, among others, and as copy editor for multiple individual collections. Verlee performs and facilitates workshops at schools, theatres, libraries, bookstores, and dive bars across North America. She collects tattoos, kisses Rottweilers, and believes in you. Find her at jeanannverlee.com.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 20, 2022
One of my absolute favorite poets who racks me with her brilliance, musicality, fierce GODDESS fearlessness! Verlee brings the reader through her experience straight-up and resurrected! DEEP DEEP WATERS!
Here are some quotes:
"every day though it's been
over three years and his shadow
still rides the length of my body
as if it now belongs to me, how
my skin took in and grew over
his violence and now spits it back
out in small fragments each time
a man stands too close on the subway."
"I adorn myself in wine
because I'm afraid of me.
The eye of my own tornado:
mouthshot and bucking.
Skin coated in gunpowder
and teeth made of flint.
Every few years I start a bonfire,
incinerate a mattress or a man
or a city, then dust off the rubble
and rebegin from the nothing
I built with my own hands."
If you don't have Verlee on your list or your lips, it's time to get her work! Watch her stampede with grace and mesmerize you on YouTube! DEEP LOVE!
Here are some quotes:
"every day though it's been
over three years and his shadow
still rides the length of my body
as if it now belongs to me, how
my skin took in and grew over
his violence and now spits it back
out in small fragments each time
a man stands too close on the subway."
"I adorn myself in wine
because I'm afraid of me.
The eye of my own tornado:
mouthshot and bucking.
Skin coated in gunpowder
and teeth made of flint.
Every few years I start a bonfire,
incinerate a mattress or a man
or a city, then dust off the rubble
and rebegin from the nothing
I built with my own hands."
If you don't have Verlee on your list or your lips, it's time to get her work! Watch her stampede with grace and mesmerize you on YouTube! DEEP LOVE!
September 6, 2018
Jeanann Verlee does it again - writes a book of poetry that will stay with you long after you put it down. This book of poetry is haunting and terrifying and beautiful. A collection of poetry chronicling pain and violence and terror but also, at times, reclaiming one's own power. A book of poetry that too many women will identify with, will find themselves among the lines of poetry:
Did he... fuck you despite
your unfortunate madness / play your song in the strip club / dance
without you
(from Unkind Years)
...the others,
masters in the sport of taming women
too wild for caging. You taste them
in the bars after work, air thick
with testosterone, whistle, guffaw.
(from Velocity)
I read this book in one sitting, I simply couldn't walk away from it. I wanted to cry, scream, gnash my teeth. And I wanted to keep reading. And keep remembering that poetry like this is needed in the world. These words will ring in my brain for a while.
Did he... fuck you despite
your unfortunate madness / play your song in the strip club / dance
without you
(from Unkind Years)
...the others,
masters in the sport of taming women
too wild for caging. You taste them
in the bars after work, air thick
with testosterone, whistle, guffaw.
(from Velocity)
I read this book in one sitting, I simply couldn't walk away from it. I wanted to cry, scream, gnash my teeth. And I wanted to keep reading. And keep remembering that poetry like this is needed in the world. These words will ring in my brain for a while.
June 2, 2023
Even better the second time reading. Required reading for any woman who has found themselves in the unfortunate trap of abuses from a man with Npd/ASPD, a sociopath, who are sadly, much more common than we think.
November 5, 2019
This book is fierce, ferocious, feminist. It left me breathless!
Read
June 5, 2025“The eye of my own tornado: / mouthshot and bucking.”
September 10, 2018
An innovative, beautiful, and timely collection on the dynamics of survival. A gut-punch of a book not meant for the squeamish or faint of heart.
November 27, 2018
‘It wasn’t all booze and inching toward death, Love lived there, too.’
Jeanann Verlee is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of three books: PREY, finalist for the Benjamin Saltman Award (Black Lawrence, 2018); Said the Manic to the Muse (Write Bloody, 2015); and Racing Hummingbirds, silver medal winner in the Independent Publisher Awards (Write Bloody, 2010). She is a recipient of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize, and her poems and essays appear in a number of journals, including Adroit, BOAAT, BuzzFeed, VIDA, and Muzzle. She has served as poetry editor for Winter Tangerine Review and Union Station, among others, and as copy editor for multiple individual collections. Verlee performs and facilitates workshops at schools, theatres, libraries, bookstores, and dive bars across North America.
This may be construed by some as a disturbing collection of poems about predators – and yes, many of the poems are achingly real – but it also is a set of poems about survival. Jeanann makes us aware of concepts we’d rather not consider, but in doing so through her excellent poetry she pleads with us to consider, to think, to act, to be aware.
Dumpster Full of Dresses
Wait for the second body. The third.
Wait and keep waiting. Severed fingers in the sink.
Blood in an old spaghetti jar.
Shoes buried like bones throughout the yard.
Wait. Let the carcasses pile high as the house.
Let his lies grow families of their own.
Hush the girl against whose temple he holds the pistol.
Wait. Surely this time he will confess.
Alias
They tell me he’s changing his name.
Dirty ol’ beast.
While a woman slick with bruise
searches for a new city.
He’s pulling on a fresh suit,
a good coat of paint.
Perhaps he’ll cut his hair.
I am just the spoiled fish,
pungent and warm.
The gnawed apple core,
nameless body in the river.
On the street, schoolchildren
play with his beard.
Ask him for another joke, a cigarette.
He’s everyone’s best jester.
In his new skin, he’ll be Brad of Karl.
Something reeking of toothpaste
and antibacterial soap.
He’ll start with the smallest prey.
A girl made of lavender, perhaps.
Or one with a pair of scuffed shoes.
His is a body that has not had to survive.
It just keeps ticking, loud
as a whisper in church.
In his wake, a trail of carcasses
and spent condoms.
Sometimes, not even that.
Pungent and powerful, these are the poems of a mature mind – a significant voice in American poetry. Highly Recommended.
Jeanann Verlee is a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellow and the author of three books: PREY, finalist for the Benjamin Saltman Award (Black Lawrence, 2018); Said the Manic to the Muse (Write Bloody, 2015); and Racing Hummingbirds, silver medal winner in the Independent Publisher Awards (Write Bloody, 2010). She is a recipient of the Third Coast Poetry Prize and the Sandy Crimmins National Prize, and her poems and essays appear in a number of journals, including Adroit, BOAAT, BuzzFeed, VIDA, and Muzzle. She has served as poetry editor for Winter Tangerine Review and Union Station, among others, and as copy editor for multiple individual collections. Verlee performs and facilitates workshops at schools, theatres, libraries, bookstores, and dive bars across North America.
This may be construed by some as a disturbing collection of poems about predators – and yes, many of the poems are achingly real – but it also is a set of poems about survival. Jeanann makes us aware of concepts we’d rather not consider, but in doing so through her excellent poetry she pleads with us to consider, to think, to act, to be aware.
Dumpster Full of Dresses
Wait for the second body. The third.
Wait and keep waiting. Severed fingers in the sink.
Blood in an old spaghetti jar.
Shoes buried like bones throughout the yard.
Wait. Let the carcasses pile high as the house.
Let his lies grow families of their own.
Hush the girl against whose temple he holds the pistol.
Wait. Surely this time he will confess.
Alias
They tell me he’s changing his name.
Dirty ol’ beast.
While a woman slick with bruise
searches for a new city.
He’s pulling on a fresh suit,
a good coat of paint.
Perhaps he’ll cut his hair.
I am just the spoiled fish,
pungent and warm.
The gnawed apple core,
nameless body in the river.
On the street, schoolchildren
play with his beard.
Ask him for another joke, a cigarette.
He’s everyone’s best jester.
In his new skin, he’ll be Brad of Karl.
Something reeking of toothpaste
and antibacterial soap.
He’ll start with the smallest prey.
A girl made of lavender, perhaps.
Or one with a pair of scuffed shoes.
His is a body that has not had to survive.
It just keeps ticking, loud
as a whisper in church.
In his wake, a trail of carcasses
and spent condoms.
Sometimes, not even that.
Pungent and powerful, these are the poems of a mature mind – a significant voice in American poetry. Highly Recommended.
July 3, 2023
(TW // mentions of SA, abuse)
we’re all bleeding from the same wounds, then, aren’t we? i don’t often reflect on having been assaulted these days. i don’t sit with those feelings of violation, i refuse to rest in them, i try to shed them immediately, i am afraid they will make me difficult to parse and even harder to love. i am afraid the fear will stick around and subduct me.
i had no choice but to revisit those emotions and see them, really see them, while reading this book. possibly the saddest way to be understood and to understand.
how freeing to shiver, to cry. to exist in all of my shame and what it has done to me.
to reckon with my wreckage, with all my urges, which i thought were only legible within my body.
we’re all bleeding from the same wounds, then, aren’t we? i don’t often reflect on having been assaulted these days. i don’t sit with those feelings of violation, i refuse to rest in them, i try to shed them immediately, i am afraid they will make me difficult to parse and even harder to love. i am afraid the fear will stick around and subduct me.
i had no choice but to revisit those emotions and see them, really see them, while reading this book. possibly the saddest way to be understood and to understand.
how freeing to shiver, to cry. to exist in all of my shame and what it has done to me.
to reckon with my wreckage, with all my urges, which i thought were only legible within my body.
March 21, 2021
3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Jeanann Verlee is a powerhouse poet. She manages to be both vulnerable and formidable at the same time, and she remarkably skilled at creating intimacy in her collections. I liked the general theme of predator and prey, but- and this is completely a personal preference thing- I'm not a fan of poems that read like stories. I personally like a more freeform style, which I feel Verlee's first collection Racing Hummingbirds does exceptionally well, so the structured poems were not my favorite. They did, however, make me very interested in reading Verlee's crack at prose, if she ever chose to delve into that style of writing.
May 28, 2023
4 stars purely because it wasn't quite as good as her other collection, Said the Manic to the Muse, which is just amazing.
Read
April 28, 2021Did not resonate with me the way I expected it to, but I still acknowledge the pain and courage it takes for each person to write on their own experiences.
September 4, 2025
Jeanann Verlee is one of the greatest poets of our time. The way she writes about trauma, loss, and various intense topics is engaging, meaningful, and makes the audience feel, which is all you can strive for as an author and poet. I would highly recommend all of her works; no matter where you come from or what your experiences may be, there is something for you in this book.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews