“Truthfully I can only tell you what’s missing” writes the heartbroken protagonist at the beginning of Victoria Mbabazi’s The Siren in the Twelfth House. But this isn’t a book that succumbs to grief. Mbabazi’s poems are siren songs, reclaiming love from pain, and rediscovering joy through the destruction and eventual rebuilding of astrological houses. Prepare to slow dance through this profound and powerful debut.

Victoria Mbabazi is a Pisces with an Aries Moon. Their first chapbook, chapbook, is available with Anstruther Press and their double chapbook Flip is available with Knife | Fork | Book. The Siren in the Twelfth House is their first full-length poetry collection. They live in Brooklyn, New York.

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With a sweeping grace and theatrical, cinematic flare, Victoria Mbabazi writes us into the delicious tropes and archetypes of astrology—from the signs to the houses to the transits—with the careful, precise eye of a poet. Siren in the Twelfth House is bright with a familiar ancient fascination—what we have with the stars, with the sky and, most of all, with each other.

Sanna Wani, author of My Grief, the Sun