God Box

by Mallory Whitten

God Box is a sacred container replete with self & other, brimming with dazzling & touching clarity, language, emotion, confidence, & self-love. In these poems & stories—pleasantly varied in style, form, subject, & place—Mallory Whiten lucidly transmutes the complex magic, joy & trials of a healing process from trauma, from within the quotidian performance & experience of being & existing as a woman. God Box, Whitten’s second book, is bright with offerings, dreams, blessings, boundaries, affirmations, prayers, synchronicities, & her signature, meticulous & necessary noticing—all of which constellate in a radiating affirmation of life that returns a self to its provenance: the holy box that holds the entire universe and—most importantly & miraculously—ourselves.

*

"I highly enjoyed God Box—a moving, surprising, powerful, inspiring book about suffering, struggling, sexism, creativity, art, work, dreams, recovery, healing, synchronicity, friendship, and change."

— Tao Lin

"Mallory Whitten exists in the delicate and precious space of writing as someone who says so much in the simplest and most up-front way possible. Her choice in and attention to recalling specific stories that happen in physical reality are always aligned with the Highest Good in the way that they lead you to remember what truly matters to you, in a way that reminds you of your own truth—no matter how different or similar it is to hers. God Box is a beautiful work of art that reflects the simultaneous incredibly light and incredible dense world back to us. Anyone will be blessed and reconnected to everything holy after reading this book."

— Erin Elizabeth Wehrenberg

"God Box is an unflinching account of mental illness, but it's not one that resorts to familiar tropes of sympathy and victimization. It treats its pain as a rare gift, to be plumbed, excoriated, and conquered. "i want to be free from all the ideas other people have about me that help them feel stronger in themselves," Mal writes. There is perhaps no truer desire."

— Andrew Weatherhead

Genres: Poetry, Short Stories, Feminism

100 pages, Paperback

First published March 10, 2017

Reviews

[Ted Prokash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful book. Beautiful language. Sort of heartbreaking. Alienating at times to read something so personal and direct for someone who has not had to deal with what the author has had to deal with. An affecting book. It will make you take a good look at yourself and that's something special.

[James Payne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Contains a relatable narrative of a mental breakdown that one reads compulsively. And a smattering of poems: many self-help, affirmation ones; travel poems about Hawaii; a memorable one about running over a cat. Some of the writing positions itself in artifice, as poems, but much is simply declarative and uninterested in being positioned formally. Themes: spirituality, mental illness, recovery, relationships, lived feminism. Gorgeous cover designs.

[Lara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I told my friend, "this book already gave me so much from just the table of contents" when I decided to get it after picking it up on a whim. a couple of these knocked the breath out of me really violently and the rest of them were like a slow exhale and I would recommend this book to all of my friends in a heartbeat

[Sarah Marchant · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a journey.

[Olivia Beeman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite the journey in such a small book.

Highly recommend.