Alicia Cook

Cook is a poet and essayist from New Jersey who writes about what addiction does to the family standing around the person, drawing on a cousin she lost and on years of letters from strangers who recognised themselves. Stuff I've Been Feeling Lately is arranged like a mixtape, a Side A of her own poems and a Side B built from lines those letters gave her, and it was a Goodreads Choice finalist in poetry in 2016. I Hope My Voice Doesn't Skip keeps the same format. She has worked in communications and advocacy alongside the writing, and argues that relatives get treated as background to somebody else's crisis when they are living through their own. The diction is plain and deliberately unliterary.