NEw release! et a meatpacking facility in the Missouri Ozarks, Dee-Dee and her co-workers kill and butcher 40,000 chickens in a single shift. The work is repetitive and brutal, with each stab and cut a punishment to her hands and joints, but Dee-Dee’s more concerned with what is happening inside her body. After a series of devastating miscarriages, Dee-Dee
has found herself pregnant, and she is determined to carry this child to term.
Dee-Dee fled the Pentecostal church years ago, but judgment follows her in the
form of regular calls from her mother, whose raspy voice urges Dee-Dee to quit living
in sin and marry her boyfriend Daddy, an underemployed ex-con with an insect
fetish. With a child on the way, at long last Dee-Dee can bask in her mother’s and
boyfriend’s newfound parturient attention. She will matter. She will be loved. She
will be complete.
When her charismatic friend Sloane reappears after a twenty-year absence, feeding her insecurities and awakening suppressed desires, Dee-Dee fears she will go
back to living in the shadows. Neither the ultimate indignity of yet another miscarriage nor Sloane’s own pregnancy deters her: she must prepare for the baby’s arrival.
By Elle Nash. Hardcover. 280 pages. Published by The Unnamed Press, 2023.