The poems in Shakira Croce's chapbook, Leave It Raw, are a celebration of the elemental forces--earth, air, fire, and water--and how they can both hurt and heal, both scrape us raw and scour us clean, in body, mind, and spirit. While these poems are grounded in flesh and blood humans and other creatures, and topographies of land, river, sea, and sky, they brim with imagination, excavate internal spaces to make hidden aspects of our humanity visible and legible to the reader. These poems reveal the abstract truth in concrete bits of lived experience, the emotional depths hiding within the deceptive exteriors of people, places, and things.

--Michael Broder, author of This Life Now and Drug and Disease Free

In her first chapbook, Shakira Croce gives readers poems that wonder about the hum of music traveling across the city, our first taste of honeysuckle, and what remains after the house fire. She shines searchlights and takes us on bus rides to the end of the line. Croce weaves together contemplations on motherhood with old love notes in the land of second honeymoons, where we find ourselves among poems that rework the elements and remind us how we are all connected. With witty and sharp lines, Leave It Raw sends us upward past skydivers, hawks, airplanes, and "up against moments of eternity." Every poem is a wild city encounter, a cry for the witnesses, and a dance with survival in our hearts.

--Juan J. Morales, author of The Handyman's Guide to End Times