Cow Stomach and Mother Fat

In his second full-length poetry collection COW STOMACH AND MOTHER FAT, Steve Halle interrogates how our innermost selves emerge from time immemorial to navigate conditional economies of being. Written and refined over a fourteen-year span, COW STOMACH AND MOTHER FAT employs the dramatis personae of Cow Stomach, Mother Fat, and Ensu Fario, whose monologues and verses use dark comedy to explore ideas of hunger, needfulness, want, desire, and love; emergence and formation of being and identity; how human and nonhuman persons are intertwined and enmeshed in precarious systems; toxicity/toxic masculinity; monstrousness; formlessness; and the politicization and regulation of gender, among other subjects. Halle’s poetry blends aggressive incantatory prose poem streams with softer lyrical flights and stylized design elements to create a sui generis work that reckons with the seemingly sacred forces that may be misused to commodify our most intimate interrelationships. "With reluctant gusto, a quiver of yum-yum and bounteous ick, Steve Halle renders a meat-masque for the gristled, beefy prisons we’ve made of our dumb hearts. Spasming between the starheight of galactopoesis and the gut-plug of pink slime, recalling “The House of Asterion” and THE COW by Ariana Reines, here comes empathy, dismay, moral outrage, self-incrimination, fantasy, disgust, and all the poisons that flesh is heir and air is also heir to. Hail Halle, dim downer, then liedown: infinite dot cow." —Joyelle McSweeney Author: Steve Halle Publisher: Veliz Books Pages: 141pp Size: 5.5 x 8.5 Notes: paperback Release Date: March 5, 2026 ISBN: 978-1949776232