Preorder my book!
Important note: Not only will you get a DISCOUNT if you preorder it before July 24, but preorders are incredibly important for me as a writer. It allows me to get paid for my work and ensures my book will be printed in the future. I’m so GRATEFUL for y’all for supporting me. It means the absolute world. My book will ship to you in September!
Alyx Chandler (she/her) is a poet from the South, currently living in Chicago, Illinois, where she teaches undergraduate writing as well as poetry to kids across the city as a Poet-in-Residence through the Chicago Poetry Center. Hollering Spell, her first collection of poetry, was a 2025 finalist in the New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition for Finishing Line Press. Her second chapbook, Girl of the Year, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks in 2027. Her poetry can be found in the EPOCH, Delta Poetry Review, North American Review, The Penn Review, and elsewhere.
Like the distinctive hum of a cicada, the poems in Hollering Spell emerge curious but urgent, taking readers to the edge of Appalachia to revel in a girl’s story of growing up in the South. Alyx Chandler delves into her debut collection with family lore, landscape, maternal lineage, sexuality, accent, and the dissonance of a place with “so much sweet paired with sting,” a hometown where “bless your heart is an insult if you use it right.” All the way from Alabama’s backroads past the GO TO CHURCH or the Devil Will Get You billboard to the “mannequin land” of cash-only flea markets to the messy piles of shrimp shells at Gulf Shores, Hollering Spell devours memories like a plate of southern comfort food. The poems move between domestic spaces and wild terrain, from porches with rocking chair ghosts to beaches where jellyfish sting, revealing just how close tenderness can be to violence. With every holler, Alyx Chandler reminds us how we remain spellbound by who and where we came from, how we’re never quite able to forget our first home.” For more, go to: instagram.com/alyxabc/.
EARLY PRAISE:
Like many a Southern gal with a sweet drawl, the poems in Alyx Chandler’s Hollering Spell are smarter—sharper, wiser, more deft and deeply cutting—than their good manners might make them look. But first, let’s praise those manners, or, as they ought to rightly be called, craft: These poems ripple with the music of carefully deployed alliteration, imagistic derring-do, and the lost art of multi-leveled metaphor where girlhood, for instance, is “a fresh-cut lawn / where secrets [are] coiled // like a water hose / stuck in kinks // spouting knots / writhing in grass // begging to spit.” Chandler takes what could be sentimental in less skilled hands—family, place of origin, memory—and, like peeling the shell from a fat Gulf shrimp, reveals the richness that is possible through the act of genuinely curious examination. As Chandler writes, “I know antennas / are all about intimacy.” And so are these perfect poems.
–Keetje Kuipers, author of LONELY WOMEN MAKE GOOD LOVERS
Hollering Spell is for anyone who suspects “beauty / ain’t shit but it exists” and rather revel in the body’s visceral joy. You will devour and savor the “sweet paired with / sting” Alyx Chandler cooks up here. I know I have and will for years to come.
–Tina Mozelle Braziel, author of Glass Cabin and Known by Salt
Is pride a wound or a weapon, and what’s that make Chandler’s hometown–a speck that she can’t make out but try, a bullet hole, a turtle creep of Toyotas, old airfields, short-leaf pines hug-haunting a highway? Alyx Chandler is as bitingly Southern gothic as one can get in such a short space. Chandler’s poetry, a mountain dark as urge, has such McCullersian wit and eye that I lassoed between guffawing and getting gut busted. Did I attempt to erase my lineage to cruelty? I love these poems, how all roads lead me South in them, how I, too, want to get a little hollering just to holler out. How I ask myself and every Southerner I know: what part of your accent has survived? And then I tell them to read Hollering Spell, read it right now under the devil’s billboard on I-65.
–C. Russell Price, author of Bisquick: An American Séance
Alyx Chandler 