ISBN: 978-1-7336619-8-0
Ebook
Publication date: September 26, 2023
Creative Nonfiction | Alcove Chapbook
Outtakes asks the difficult questions but with humor and a deft, lighthearted hand. Why are we here? How can we exist? Why do we make art? Through the use of unconventional forms, Joanna Acevedo portrays a young memoirist’s experience of a life that is broken, beautiful, and confusing all at once. Born of misplaced love and frantic experimentation, Outtakes explores the confessional through the lens of the universal, yielding up unexpected joy, inevitable pain, and brilliant light.
“Joanna Acevedo’s Outtakes is a personal history condensed; it reminiscences in waves. In flashes and vignettes, this collection wanders through relationships, through an unmedicated mind writing ‘a story about the body.’ Outtakes is a ride, a coaster stuttering and clanging, a ‘bowl full of dead bees.’ Acevedo wants us to know how it feels to be human in a house of cards on fire. In the end, we are left with the certainty that ‘this is living’.”
—Allison Blevins, author of Cataloguing Pain
“Joanna Acevedo’s Outtakes is a brilliant, barely legal journey in search of meaning via a language Acevedo knows to be limited. Yet these symbols on the page are all she has to take us on this technicolor voyage through the body, mind, city. We are right there with her—worrying about nuclear holocaust, awaiting violence, pondering confessional art, and the woman who pulled a manifesto out of her vagina, showing up late on acid, only to eat an entire wheel of brie. And we are better for it: bolder, sharper, more barely legal, more apt to wonder at the world.”
—Caroline Hagood, author of Filthy Creation and Weird Girls
“To paraphrase Emerson’s letter to Whitman, let us greet Joanna Acevedo at the beginning of a great career. In this, her newest book, I find wonderful things written incomparably well. I rubbed my eyes a little, to make sure this unsentimental sunbeam was no illusion. Thankfully, the book is a certainty. It is tough and lush at times, gentle and plain at others, and somehow vivid and in motion even while it allows for deep stillness. Her language is unsparingly beautiful in its brutal honesty. I found all of life here. You will too.”
—Sharon Mesmer, author of Greetings From My Girlie Leisure Place
About the author
Joanna Acevedo is a writer, editor, and educator from New York City. She is the author of two books and two chapbooks, and her writing has been seen across the web and in print, including in Jelly Bucket, Hobart, and The Adroit Journal, among others. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021, and also holds degrees from Bard College and The New School.