Poetry. Simultaneously enchanting and brutal, taylor jacob pate's debut book BECOMING THE VIRGIN is a work of desperate intensity. This series of interconnected confessional-cum-fairy- tale poems whisk the reader along at a breakneck pace. pate's language is at once hard and gem-like, exquisitely ornate, and succinctly muscular. The text oscillates from spellbinding beauty and wonder to undercurrents of uncontrollable violence, passion, pain, and melee. It travels the fluxes between self and creature. It loses itself in dark forests of language: branches in which we all become entangled.