Published by Broadstone Books in 2024, poems in These Pink Cocoons of Ice explore the ways that societal perspectives on feminine sexuality are both internalized and rejected in a battle to forge one’s own identity. Inhabiting contradiction, poems draw metaphor from the scenic, taking the bittersweet, complex—and at times traumatic—memories of adolescence and sexuality and interweaving them with natural imagery. The collection’s honest struggle to break free from traditional views on female sexuality is further exemplified through its breaking of form; it merges prose and poetry, experiments with typographic symbols and punctuation, and reconfigures the sequencing of its own pages. The 21-poem chapbook includes poetry that has been recognized in international journals alongside never-seen-before pieces.
“These Pink Cocoons of Ice is a vivid extolment of the magic and wonder of the natural world. Formally inventive and highly imagistic, Younge’s lyric brings blunt vision to the ordinary violence that oft accompanies femininity. These poems roam the wilds, the spooky dens of snakes and spiders, paying witness to the brutal rites of burgeoning womanhood—the howling, the warp, the fruit, the blood. Here is heartbreak, desire, wounding, laid bare. These Pink Cocoons of Ice is an offering from a dazzling new voice in contemporary poetry, praise song to Black femmehood, in all its delicacy and shimmer, incorruptible and ever glorious.”
—Chekwube Danladi, award-winning author of Semiotics
“Less a study in pink than a study of dissected guavas and severed tongues, "These Pink Cocoons of Ice'' is a masterclass in the use of poetic color. Adolescence feels infinite in these pages, and the snakes and ever-present insects that skitter from margin to margin abandon traditional nightsong for something altogether more dangerous. Younge's experiments with typography add a cerebral high note to the darker and more ferocious work of this collection, which wrestles with questions of feminine identity and walks away ‘dripping in stallion's blood.’"
—Michael Young, editor of Rust + Moth Literary Magazine
“In her collection of poems, These Pink Cocoons of Ice, Younge challenges conventional social expectations of female sexuality, exposing in new and exciting ways the systems that dictate what it means to be feminine and then in turn oppress those who are. With stunning imagery and breathtaking use of form, Younge’s poems insist on truth, both the beautiful and the violent, urging us to reject society’s prescripts, to define ourselves on our own terms, to “move : resist : giggle : persist : spread open,” because the reality is that ‘tomorrow, we may be devoured.’”
—Stephanie McCarley Dugger, author of Either Way, You’re Done