“What happens when a book insists on a system of naming that refuses pronoun, language that decenters the subject, and a grammar that defamiliarizes the world? Kolby Harvey’s wildly inventive, playfully surreal Mothercake Cycle—a fierce, funny, and strange little book of collages that evade while they insist on a radical queer embodiment. The mothercake—the discarded organ that feeds the fetus, the sponge that filters the toxins from the past body into the future body, the animal afterbirth from a second labor—is at once an absurd character and a powerful metaphor for queer estrangement, dysmorphia, and disidentification. Pulling language from fairy tales, video games, and Designing Women, the mothercake, like a placenta protecting the vulnerable queer child within while absorbing a toxic culture, is a drag persona, an avatar, where a cord connects us to a tender thing.” – Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, author of Beast Meridian
