Title: Complete and Total Honesty
Publisher: Neon Origami
Author: M Anne Avera
Pages: 66pp

The summer is searing, joyous, painful and yet necessary – the rain piercing on sidewalks and grassy infinities, the sticky-sweet glow of ice cream and fleeting memories rapidly fading, the narrator confessing that “most days now i spend summer inside. i’m tending to wounds set deep in my hide.” This is no idyllic or nostalgic portrayal of summer, or an overly angsty form of seasonal depression, but instead something raw and real and brutal. To M. Anne Avera, this is complete and total honesty.

Out in 2025 via independent publishing house Neon Origami, Complete And Total Honesty is aptly described in its blurb as “a brutal, lyrical, and unflinching exploration of survival, faith, madness, and love.” Avera, a queer Alabama-based author, educator, and editor of horror-focused publication The Dread Literary Review, has published work in Fjords Review, Eunoia Review, Cathexis NorthWest, and other literary magazine projects; this is her first chapbook. The project explores themes of spirituality, trauma, queer identity, and above all, the sensory and embodied experiences that define us.

The book starts fittingly with a poem entitled “Full Control” that describes the exact opposite – desire that overwhelms and challenges the speaker, embodiment that defies narrative – and then the tone quickly shifts to the poetics of the disaster queer: “Slap your ex-fiancee. Slap him again if you so please. Turn your back to the sun. It’s vitamin D, baby” (Avera 6). Sometimes violent and supernatural, occasionally intimate, and always intensely raw, Avera’s poetics consistently use form to pull focus to one element or another. Some poems, like the religiously influenced “Nearer To Thee,” lean on repetition, while others use loose rhyme schemes – yet Avera also makes the occasional foray into fiction, as with “you are unbearably cold,” a microfiction piece detailing a protagonist’s challenges with self-care.

Yet this chapbook does not only use supernatural references, discussion of spirituality, and the like for shock value; it also, crucially, describes spirituality through the lens of somatic experiencing. Avera writes poetry in conversation with both scripture and queer desire, and her focus on embodiment is the common thread tying it all together. This tendency is also a hallmark of queer liberationist spirituality. First Protocols Of Queer Goetia, a text published six years prior on Contagion Press, is widely positioned within anarchist circles as a guide to the queering of personal spirituality; within, it advises readers to “Decompose your identity. Open holes through which the other might enter. / These spirits blur boundaries, between genders, between self and other, between living and dead. Learn to submit to that undoing and still come out the other end / […] Your mind is a fleshy organ of your body. Nourish and care for your sensual capacities.”

Throughout Complete And Total Honesty, Avera’s combination of spiritual allusions with unapologetic declarations of physical desire exemplify this impetus to “blur boundaries,” this belief that spirituality should be a somatic experience.

In Part Three of the chapbook, solely entitled “Reckoning,” Avera’s poetry takes a surreal turn. The speaker expresses desire via extended metaphor, as in the viscerally felt line “I saw you crumbling high, a lone carin [sic] / and you melt as rocks melt towards glacial sprawl.” They describe a feeling of primal desire explicitly intertwined with their spirituality, yet also make it utterly realistic, depicting a scene in which “There’s shoplifted mascara making raccoon / masks out of our wide eyes, / and we ride hell bound all over town.” Thus, they equate love to divinity while never veering into holier-than-thou pretension, keeping a reassuringly down-to-earth tone – a decision that, in its simplicity, sets the tone for the whole chapbook. Avera articulates a queer and feminist spirituality without ever positioning themself as an authority figure, making Complete And Total Honesty a radically accessible project. All the while, they maintain a healthy devotion to feminist and queer rage, declaring that “Hell hath no fury like / a woman backed into a corner.”

[mk zariel {it/its + masc terms} is a transmasculine neuroqueer theater artist, Best Of The Net and Monarch Award nominated poet, movement journalist, and BashBack aligned anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. the author of VOIDGAZING (2026, Whittle Micropress) and BOY APPARITION (2025, Vinegar Press), it can be found online at https://mkzariel.carrd.co/, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.]