Bottom Feeders by Arielle Hebert
Black Lawrence Press, 2026
Bottom Feeders, Arielle Hebert’s debut collection, blazes as fiercely as the Florida sun. Hebert’s voice—breathless, willing to bare, with equal transparency, her darkest moments and the effervescence of queer joy—dazzles, balancing electric language with precise form. In “Bottom Feeders,” Hebert travels to her childhood in Florida, a land split between the wealthy, “the waterfront mansions made of glass,” and the “bottom feeders,” “our people, or at least / they were from the same shit we came from.” “We were the kind of girls / that brought a bat to prom,” Hebert writes in “Alligator Fight.” These are girls who learned from the circus that wintered in Florida “how to lap up the slack-jawed looks of a crowd / hungry for entertainment” (“Circus Town”), girls who deal drugs to the rich, hoping to “get tipped with a broken pill // or a line to blow with their rolled-up hundred” (“Bottom Feeders”).
The young Hebert falls in love with one of these girls, a dealer unfurling “a royal flush, / stolen Visas and Mastercards” at Walmart (“Magician’s Assistant”). There are good moments, as Hebert writes in “I Promise Not to Leave the Good Days Out”:
We had dinner together. We went to the breach.
We talked for hours.
She’d come to my window just to say
goodnight. She always got me home.
Then there is Hebert’s girlfriend “shaking and rattling” through withdrawal, on her “couch for two days straight, / watching re-runs of Saved by the Bell and / puking into a bucket” (“Codependence”). There’s the moment, in “Clean,” when her “girlfriend tried to overdose, / ate the rest of her painkillers / washed them down with a fifth of gin.” Their relationship crumbles under the tide of addiction: this is Florida at the start of the opioid epidemic, which Hebert describes in “Trap Doors”:
a whole town of trap doors,
and always someone lost
on the other side,
someone you loved
and would follow
across any dark threshold.
Hebert’s girlfriend haunts her like a ghost she “watched drift back and forth between rehab and prison, that I feared I would find dead next to me in bed” (“Phantasmagoria”). Years later, far from Florida, Hebert is still haunted: “every empty room I entered burned with you.” In “Above All Things, Love,” Hebert sees herself as a specter as well, one of “the ghosts of those girls / who will dance late into the night.”
Perhaps this kind of haunting is necessary for the act of poetry, which Hebert describes as “[r]aising our old selves up like Lazarus / for questioning” (“Athazagoraphobia”). But poetry brings redemption, too. In “The Dead Layer,” Hebert, who once “never dreamed / she’d outlive leaving home,” recognizes and celebrates her survival. The joy of her present life—“[t]he chroma, the brilliance”—wouldn’t have happened without her past:
without chain smoking grief
away in the side yard, and loving people at the wrong time,
without sunburns and oranges, all the blue hours,
low tides, crushed white moonshells underneath.
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Emma Bolden is the author of a memoir, The Tiger and the Cage: A Memoir of a Body in Crisis (Soft Skull), and the poetry collections House Is an Enigma, medi(t)ations, and Maleficae. Her fourth collection, God Elegy, is forthcoming from BOA Editions.