GOOD GRIEF is a collection of flash essays about grief in all its everyday ugliness and, well, goodness. These essays grieve a writing journey marred by racism and queerphobia, a father lost to suicide, an adolescence lost to assault, a life predetermined by their bipolar disorder. The grief of being alive in the United States as a queer disabled person of color! SG Huerta is a queer Xicanx writer from Dallas. A 2023 Roots Wounds Words Fellow and 2024 Tin House participant, they spend their time freelancing and working on the masthead of literary organizations such as Abode Press, ANMLY, and Split Lip Magazine. SG is the author of two poetry chapbooks, The Things We Bring with Us (Headmistress Press 2021) and Last Stop (Defunkt Magazine 2023). Their work has appeared in Barrelhouse, Bodega Magazine, The Offing, Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, and elsewhere. Find them at sghuertawriting.com, or in Texas with their partner and two cats, standing unwaveringly with oppressed and colonized peoples everywhere. "Holy fuck indeed! GOOD GRIEF is a moving, tender, necessary release. SG Huerta’s lyrical essays are the exclamations of a writer giving voice to their body and to what haunts that body, writing against the compartmentalization of their many selves but instead toward a wholeness of being which is so often denied by forces both institutional and personal. With the concision of a poet and the candor of an essayist, SG grounds reflections on abuse, discrimination, addiction, and loss in a voice that is incisive, funny, resilient, and able to hold many oppositional truths at once. “There is comfort in transition,” SG writes, and these essays embody the beautiful messiness of liminal space, the lifelong work that is healing and writing and loving. These essays will break your heart; they will stitch it into something new." —Sean Enfield, author of Holy American Burnout! "The innovative, formally experimental, and dreamlike lyric prose of SG Huerta’s GOOD GRIEF pulls us forward as if on a train with no breaks. “I want back what I couldn’t have,” says Huerta, “I want back the impossible.” This book reclaims the body, reclaims what was stolen, and without pelos en la lengua, achieves what seems impossible for so many of us; to reverse the thundering wail at the end of our breaking and let it drown the roots and origins of our pain. These words mourn, but do not forget the cruelties. They defy the silence that is commonplace in the aftermath of violence and will remind you too, reader, to not let others keep what they have stolen from you." —Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, author of Children of the Land ISBN 9798991523660 Pub Date 01/14/2025 Page Count 52
