[10/23/26] Drescher, Julia: The Cuts

Beautiful Days Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 23, 2026

Publisher Marketing: 

The Cuts, Julia Drescher’s second full-length collection, is a daybook of loosened language, whose organs wander in & through bodies of words. Across four poetic sequences, bookended by two shorter pieces, Drescher’s charged, propositional lines hold true to the dual rhythms of walking and reading, while a third, “the thick bass of pain” swells underneath.

In The Cuts, thinking is “emotional in a physical sense” and cuts across itself, holding this discomposure as a residue of questions rather than answers. It is an anti-biography, “unhinged from a concept, flapping,” and populated by others: desert stones and roaches, residues of Latin, the flower’s calyx, a trashy nerve, whale-gray titanium, a weed that spits, and “the fifty wrens event the evening is.”

Writing across the holes the cuts make, and around fragments of Lispector, Tarkovsky, and dozens of others, Drescher’s poems shimmer. “There are many wrong ways to do this,” she begins, parenthetically, “& we have found all of them.”

Praise for The Cuts:

These revolutionary poems are on the side of the brain, a large confusing fruit that grew from the biosphere and which does the thing called imagining, for free, spreading its airy roots everywhere, reaching for other brains. These poems assault “the cruelty of the concept”; they go after “mind” and “subject” and their command control fantasies. They are poems in solidarity with soul as the way this brain spreads through time. They are…very good.

–Timothy Morton

I’ve come to think The Cuts occur at the very point of death or else cause it. By death I mean the end of consciousness as it folds into a heightened posthumous receptivity, a both/and state in which one attains “the zero degree of flowering,” the keen(ing) wisdom that “because things shimmer they leave language.” By death I also mean those exhilarating blips of time in which one is wrenched away from sense-making into the mystic and misheard residues of quotidian speech. Julia Drescher’s poetics of the edge emerges at once from deep study and lusty abandon to grammar’s every pliancy and rhythmic judder. I could repeat a line like “At the tips, the colors give conniptions” over and over to myself—and I do!

–Aditi Machado

Julia Drescher has long been perfecting the extended, continuous thought-line, composing long, essay-stretches of lyric sentences in layered, accumulative sequence. There’s such a glorious way her poems hold together by being pulled completely apart; a pacing that on the surface reads so endlessly precise.

–rob mclennan

The Cuts is a magnum opus of saturated language, cradling a maximum range of vicissitudes and vicinities in its fold. Poems poised at the edges of extinction, between living and dying countervail the illusion of fixed positions. Sensations teeter with “sticky nerves” undergoing “conduction through emotional facts”. Here language is instrumental, absorptive, transformative. The glistening intelligence of these poems is a core curriculum for existence.

–Brenda Iijima