he says there’s something like a fire
& a fire comes
& i’m crying in a fire
he says ashes
& the fire is done
& i’m making a river
out of the ash
i’m making a beautiful river
& he’s like
yes

What My Hair Says About You is the final cry of a weary soul. These are poems about the same mistakes we make over and over again in the name of love. Laura Theobald’s full-length debut will break your heart in a good way.

Laura Theobald is the author of three books of poetry—Salad Days (Maudlin House, 2021), Kokomo (Disorder Press, 2019), and What My Hair Says About You (Metatron Press, 2017)—plus three chapbooks. She’s a PhD candidate in English at UGA in Athens and received an MFA from LSU, where she served as Editor of New Delta Review. In her spare time she designs books for small press publishers.

POETRY
96 pages
Cover design | Eric Amling and Laura Theobald
ISBN | 978-1-988355-03-0
Fall 2016

Blurbs

“With feral criminality, Laura Theobald is sucking on your face & poking a finger in your eye & stripping the gold veins right out of the bald mess of your heart & selling them on eBay. She is buying you a mansion, which doubles as a bonefield & enlisting you as a servant to her obscene fragility. She is rummaging through vaults of dismembered love, she is plucking the sun out of the sky, she is asking where you hid all the miracles. She is asking what forgiveness costs, she is defacing all the oracles with shit, she is throwing her own bones at the void.”

- Lara Glenum, author of Pop Corpse

“With intensity and uncompromising honesty, the rawness in What My Hair Says About You goes beyond autobiography, confession, and the individual in search of desire rather than its cursory objects. Repulsion structures a world where fucking and consorting with demons is a threat of pleasure soaked in blood, love, and the awful tenderness of being too much and being alone.”

- Cassandra Troyan, author of Kill Manual

“In Laura Theobald’s debut full-length, What My Hair Says About You, the author gives up on communication and instead decides to tell the reader how she really feels. Theobald’s casual charm, boredom and occasional bereftness take you hand-in-hand, poem by poem, among the flowers and dead woods and bedroom scenes and emotional weather. Consider this poem, ‘Sleep,’ in its entirety: 'sleep until I forget you/ until orange is blue.' Come for the poetry, stay for the complications and contradictions, stay for the feels.”

- Ben Fama, author of Fantasy

“Laura Theobald’s What My Hair Says About You makes me feel like I went up on the roof of the 7/11 to sunbathe and console my heartbreak, and I am drinking a Full Throttle Blue Demon Slurpee that I dumped half a bottle of cough syrup into, and the day is ending and I am filled with a warm sun glow and I am admiring the sunset and this flying flock of birds, perfect and black against the pastel sky, except wait, those aren’t birds, those are bats. SO I guess what I mean to say is there is nothing like it, and it is both beautiful and creepy all at once.”

- Juliet Escoria, author of Black Cloud

Press

Sink | "In the case of What My Hair Says About You, content and form are so complimentary in their depiction of a dissolving relationship, it’s hard not to believe that Theobald is just telling us how she really feels."

Entropy | “What My Hair Says About You is not merely an exercise in millennial imagination and desire, but a language for combating demons. A language of breastbone, and rivers, and weeds, and suffocating, tree-like hair. Theobald’s readers will be engorged with dreams, surveilled by chrysanthemums, hammered by dust, followed into caves, and obscured by flowers. You will get lost in this book.”

Largehearted Boy | “[What My Hair Says About You examines] the impact zone when we allow ourselves to be close to someone.”

New Orleans Review | “In What My Hair Says About You, Theobald forges irony, wit, sadness, and self-awareness into something new, strange, and lovely.”

Maudlin House | The Question of You with Laura Theobald