Yellow Amy Pence 9781636284767

CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED AUTHOR

"Mysterious and mesmerizing."--Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You

Yellow is a luminous, genre-defying debut that fuses cosmic mystery, trauma, and transformation. It will take you on a journey through time, space, and the inner wilderness of one girl's mind.

It's 1973: summer of the Watergate hearings and Skylab's launch into space when 12-year-old Z discovers an unclassified slime mold growing in her Louisiana backyard. Something compels her deep coherence with this magical creature-until an incident with a serial killer at the lake disrupts their connection. Both mystifying and metaphorical, Yellow becomes a guiding force for her brother Clem, a New Orleans seeker. As years pass, Z tries to recover what life has taught her to forget. A multi-threaded novel, Yellow weaves fact, physics, space exploration, and philosophy to create a transcendent reading experience.

Amy Pence is the author of the poetry collections The Decadent Lovely and Armor, Amour, two chapbooks, Skin's Dark Night and Your Posthumous Dress, as well as the award-winning hybrid [It] Incandescent. Her poetry, short fiction, reviews, and interviews have appeared in over 100 literary magazines. Raised in New Orleans and Las Vegas, Amy studied poetry at the University of Arizona. She taught college English, poetry writing at Emory and in other workshop settings, and now tutors high schoolers part-time. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

"Who could guess that the story of a young girl's fascination with slime mold would open into the riveting portrayal of a particular family's history, a female artist's archetypal journey, the textures and tensions of America, Hurricane Katrina, a predator's mind, the Space Race/alien encounters, our relationship with the natural world, and the nature of consciousness? Searingly intelligent and deftly woven, this extraordinary multidimensional narrative is not to be missed."
-Claire Bateman, Author of The Pillow Museum and Wonders of the Invisible World

"Mysterious and mesmerizing, Yellow weaves a thick spell, moving from the Vietnam War to the Covid-19 pandemic, from a backyard in Louisiana to the vastness of outer space. Filled with wonder, awe, and occasional despair, this gorgeous debut thrillingly reconsiders the form of the novel itself, ultimately reaching into new realms of possibility and otherworldly hope."
-Claire Stanford, Author of Happy for You