Books
Pigeon House: Buy Now
Pigeon House is pulled from the stories women tell each other in hushed tones over a tea-kettle, a firepit, at the nail salon, while stirring a steamy cauldron, or kicking mud into an open grave. It's cottagecore meets bog witch, Ophelia floating down the river in the John Everett Millais painting, Anne of Green Gables if she lived in modern times and only ever loved bad men, Stevie Nicks if her album Bella Donna was a haunting. Pigeon House is for the Practical Magic cult-witches who spent the late 90's sectioning themselves off between the Jillians and the Sallys only to wake one day as the aunts. It's for the manic-pixie-dream girlies, the Harley Quinn used-to-be's, the ex-girlfriends of Heathcliff and Team Jess and Jimmy Angelo. You'll come for the magic, stay for that youthful gnawing hunger, and leave with the ghosts of your lovers past.
Little Deaths: Preorder
New full-length poetry collection coming July 1 2024 from Riot in Your Throat Press. Little Deaths is a collection of poems that provide the reader with insight into loss: of love, of stories never told, of the dogs who become so much more than simple pets. The poems don’t end there however, they carry the reader forward, into a place where grief grows and blossoms, and eventually blooms into something more—healing and hope. Without ever tipping over into sentimentality, Shilo Niziolek weaves poems that will make you simultaneously weep with sorrow and then step outside barefoot and tremble in awe at the absurdity and beauty of living. This collection shows us what real love looks like and how once a dog or person has burrowed into your heart, you’ll never ever want it any other way.
Fever- Buy Now
A memoir made up of essays fragments, Fever, examines what it is to desire throughout all phases and states of life and being. Niziolek mixes plain language with poetic prose to interrogate trauma from domestic violence and illness, sexuality, and the different ways we can and do love despite these things. All of this comes together to create a keen focus on the many ways one can experience desire and its intersection with love.
"Fever’s painstaking sentences have an inimitable prosody and flavor, and they cast bright heat, warming and curing each other. This fever is one that we’re lucky to have."
—Sarah Manguso, author of Very Cold People
Dirt Eaters- Buy Now
Dirt Eaters is an exploration of grief centered around the dying and death of a beloved pet. Niziolek walks blithely through pre-grief, that nostalgic ache of what is to come and what will be lost, straight into present-moment grief, dangling precariously over that arduous cliff, and falls right down into the after, where dogs are dead, hearts decimated, and she curls her body tightly around the hollow space where love was.
Through uncanny and keen awareness of the life cycles around her: squished spiders, crows playing in birdbaths, the “clean violet air, sharp-toothed after monsooning”, endless games of Farkle and the risk of love, the minutiae of dog days, a bag of ladybugs released in a garden, the seismic gap a body leaves, to discarded crawdad shells, dead visitations that happen in sleep, past tomatoes ripening; Niziolek asks us to consider the animalistic nature of loss and grief. In Dirt Eaters we discover that what is holy and sacred may not be in the heavens, but here in a pile of grass where a dog took its last breath, or even deeper still, down in the dirt, where we all must come.
atrophy- Buy Now
On the heels of her memoir, FEVER, Niziolek's debut poetry collection, atrophy, continues pulling even further at the same threads: desire, grief, trauma, love, and illness. However, the primary beast that stalks these pages is the body in isolation, the body in decay, the body as animalistic and wounded and deadly in its pursuit of living. atrophy has all the promise of a young poet and all the grit of a grown woman who has repeatedly clawed her way through the dirt.
A Thousand Winters In Me-BUY
"I’ve never been afraid of my own pain. I only seek to stop the death of everyone and everything I love. I want us all to be unending, but sometimes, there is never even a heartbeat. The heartbeat is gone. It’s gone. It’s gone, and it never existed, but it’s alive. It is inside all of us."
A Thousand Winters in Me is a collection of essays that form a body of grief and survival: A telling of love's unstoppable march despite the lover long gone, the body's continuance breakdown, and time's crushing irony. Deeply lyrical and introspective, the essays in this chapbook collect into a haunting chant, a way of carrying on through grief and glory.