“Katie Longofono’s collection Angeltits is a magnificent look into modern personhood—especially when that personhood revolves around the identity of being a woman—or female-bodied. It questions gender stereotypes and why humans interact in such a closeted, emotionally violent way. In her poem ‘We Are Mostly Merciful,’ it begins with sage lines: ‘We are mostly merciful we give in/we say uncle relatively speaking/it’s easy not like sifting flour/or kneading,’ and then powerfully ends with the line: ‘women walking between/familiar rooms.'”
-Joanna Valente
“Angeltits comes in real as the blood of a cut lip in a kiss, ‘a sweet red decanted/ on their tongues.’ Here, Longofono, in strong boned poems by turns quiet and loud with pain and sex, defies objectification, and in so doing, reclaims her subjectivity. In her aubade ‘One Morning, Every Morning,’ Longofono’s speaker becomes a poem: ‘you break but can’t explain/where. You’d call yourself a shell/except it evokes the cage/of something pink and tough which is true/but you also mean how often/you are a single line.’ This work voices the unspoken moments, musky with sex and violence, in which women are portrayed and betrayed, reduced, and replies, ‘I am not a bird or a symbol. / I am a woman burning.'”
-Marina Weiss
“In her electrified, electrifying poems, Katie Longofono writes lines that spark with anger, hurt, and intelligence. Like a cross between an open wound and a live downed wire, this collection dares its readers to look more closely at all the damage and power a young woman’s body can contain. By turns elegant and brutal, Angeltits is a remarkable, potent collection, and Longofono a sharp, wild poet.”
-Heather Christle