Allie Marini Batts holds degrees from Antioch University of Los Angeles & New College of Florida, meaning she can explain deconstructionism, but cannot perform simple math. Her work has been a finalist for Best of the Net & nominated for the Pushcart Prize. She is Managing Editor for the NonBinary Review, Unbound Octavo, & Zoetic Press, & has previously served on the masthead for Lunch Ticket, Spry Literary Journal, The Weekenders Magazine, Mojave River Review & Press, & The Bookshelf Bombshells. Allie is the author of Unmade & Other Poems, (Beautysleep Press, 2013) & You Might Curse Before You Bless (ELJ Publications, 2013). She has 5 collections forthcoming in 2015: wingless, scorched & beautiful, (Imaginary Friend Press), Before Fire, (ELJ Publications), This Is How We End (Bitterzoet), Pictures From The Center Of The Universe (Paper Nautilus, Winner of the Vella Prize) & Southern Cryptozoology: A Field Guide To Beasts Of The Southern Wild (Hyacinth Girl Press.) Allie rarely sleeps, and her mother has hypothesized that she is actually a robot fueled by Diet Coke & Sri Racha.

Books by Allie Marini Batts:

Other poems on the web by Allie Marini Batts:
Three poems
"Give Us a Smile, Girl"
"Pussy Pass"
"Origins"
"Travelling Souvenirs"

About Before Fire: Divorce Poems:

"Each poem in this collection is a stepping stone in a swollen, stormy river, to the other side where a new wholeness awaits. They are rendered through the center of the fire with a sense of trust that fireburns away the unnecessary, to the necessary self. From the title poem, 'Before Fire'- 'the wolf-god in the sky had control of fire./those who control firecontrol life. it's that powerful a thing./woman seduced him and hid it in her vagina,/the hidden pocket like a kangaroo pouch, and this gained us domain./we call it sex and it serves us well.' I'm betting that Ms. Batts has the key to the fire/power pouch, as these poems claim their own domain- BRAVA!"
—Alma Luz Villanueva

"Allie Marini Batts is a poet whose work grabs you by the throat with fervor and demands to be heard. There is a strong sense of duality here: At turns mournful and reveling, Before Fire is a collection of an awful and necessary beauty, and Batts' language entices the reader just as it horrifies. Don't try to turn away — It is dirty work, this."
—Margaret Bashaar

"Allie Marini Batts' Before Fire: Divorce Poems is a steel-girded elegy that instructs, 'I have taught you well / how to leave me.' Batts' speaker masterfully mourns and acts; she is the voice of the put upon wife but also the wanderer who knows her secret freedoms. In these embodied words, littered with domestic menageries such as 'wings fluttering like sheaves of unpaid bills,' it is explicit that divorce has given more than it has taken. Separation brings about Batts' stunning linguistic transparency in stanzas like, 'The house smells of smoke / and spilled drinks, your loud stories / and my lonely heart.' Before Fire is an exquisite dissection of femininity and feminism, a blue flame that simultaneously combusts and illuminates our definition of 'wife.'"
—Sandra Marchetti