Eldredge Books

Praise for A Body Tangled in Time

This book is a supernova. Nastashia Minto writes and sings and prays her way from trauma to erotic power and joy in exactly the terms Audre Lorde described: “The erotic is the measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Nastashia travels the body—inside and out—toward becoming, like an awareness blooming into an ecstatic state. A thrilling event horizon.

—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of the novel Thrust and the memoir The Chronology of Water

In this luminous, multisensorial work, Nastashia Minto weaves poetry and song to share the narrative of a soul determined to discover a higher path than the one that might have been predicted for her. With profound insight and agency, Nastashia has not just healed from trauma—she has soared above it and now shares her story as a gift to the rest of us. We are lucky to witness it. Nastashia shines.

—Shavaun Scott, psychotherapist, author of Wounded—The Forgotten Survivors of Gun Violence

Tight and explosive, erotic and unfurled, this collection will go straight to your heart. Nastashia Minto is a true talent, with the willingness to tell the truth about our world. This book sings.

—Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of The Child Finder 

Lyrical prose, a hybrid wonder. A Body Tangled in Time by Nastashia Minto is a singing back, a wailing, a wild card, a prayer to the possible in the face of what denies, an ode to the Black queer female, an erotic hymn, a psalm, a balm. Minto pulls transgenerational trauma and pain up by the roots and shows the way back to a body in time. This book is an invitation.

—Kelly Thompson, editor of Voices on Addiction at The Rumpus. 

Please read this urgent, gorgeous, deeply felt book by Nastashia Minto. A Body Tangled in Time is full to the brim with pain and sensuality and yearning and forgiveness. And the music in this book! You’ll feel it down to your toes. Minto has managed to explore the personal and the universal in a way that delivers the most beautiful punch to your heart.

—Liz Scott, psychologist, author of This Never Happened

Through a combination of poetry, prose, and song, Nastashia Minto gifts the world with a personal story of honoring the body, healing through trauma, and the beauty of living in your skin. A Body Tangled in Time reached deep into my being with its words; the complexity of relationships that are familial, romantic, and internally with the self are beautifully conveyed in Minto’s varied forms of narrative and lyrical composition. This collection is one that will stay with me for a long time.

—Zaji Cox, author of Plums for Months: Memories of a Wonder-Filled Neurodivergent Childhood

In this book you hold poems honest as steel, a memoir of loving survival, gratitude for life’s tough gifts, and a handbook for recovery where hurt is intertwined with love. These poems will sweep you off your feet, and this voice will guide you forward toward resilience. These are spells to conjure your well-being. Let this healer sing to you.

—Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar

“I needed to sit with my body,” writes Nastashia Minto on her ever-evolving odyssey of ancestral repair and time healing. A Body Tangled in Time is mystic incantation and sensual prayer. With profound awareness, Minto detangles constricted fascia, massaging painful swelling from generational trauma. Minto drains lymph, darns and mends frayed DNA, realigns synapses until she recouples the body, mind, and spirit. What is left? Pure love that shines through until, she writes, “I am who I say that / I am, the joy of my ancestors.” She shares her light with them and, generously, with us, her readers. Lucky us.

—Amy Baskin, author of Night Hag and Hysterical Cake

For some of us, when we hear others share their stories, we feel invited to know them. Nastashia Minto is the kind of poet who, with their extensive storytelling prowess, invites us to discover ourselves. A Body Tangled in Time, is a reminder that love is boundless, and complex, and imperative for existing in the skin we are in.

—Kesha Ajose Fisher, award-winning author of No God Like The Mother

Minto turns her gaze, her touch, her listening, her tasting, her every inhalation to this work. Unflinching, this narrator commits to sensation—pleasure and pain—with the intention of fully meeting the traumas of the past in the present and breaking generational curses. But this book isn’t only a dismantling. With each poem, each prose piece, each page, Minto rebuilds a bridge of belonging to her body, a bridge the reader can’t help but feel rebuilding in their body too. Through these pages, Minto’s voice leaps from the written word to the sung and spoken word with ease and truth. She refuses the suffocation of the over-culture, and instead chooses and claims the resuscitation of her inner culture, as she sings every tangled thread loose and into a new story of self.

—Jen Violi, author of Putting Makeup on Dead People  

A Body Tangled in Time is a record—even a celebration—of the search, the struggle, to find one’s self. The self beyond the limitations of biology, cultural oppression, and the sometimes toxic expectations of those who have shaped you, often the same ones who love you and that you love. The self that learns to make peace with the trauma, that revels in sensuality, that takes the pain and perceived failures of the past and writes a new song. Minto’s writing, as always, balances the lyrical with the gut-punch. Rough and tender, expansive and intimate, and rising from deep inside the body, up through the weight of history, all of it intensely personal—and therefore universal—as all great art is.

—Stephen O’Donnell, author of half-light

Nastashia Minto’s lyrical language will rearrange your heart cells. In this hybrid, genre-bending dance of poetry, prose, and songs, we feel the ache and longing and beauty of being human as Minto journeys us through heartache, heartbreak, family trauma, ancestral trauma, love, sex, seeking, healing, and ultimately finding beauty in the hardest places—all through the lens of bodies. All wrapped in Minto’s raw and honey voice. Please read A Body Tangled in Time out loud to hear the gorgeous rhythms Minto breathes onto the page, to hear her stunning voice standing tall.

—Anne Gudger, author of The Fifth Chamber

In A Body Tangled in Time, Nastashia Minto weaves a lush tapestry in glimpses: hurt and renewal, science and mysticism, lament and celebration, soft curves and sharp angles, a dynamic journey of poem and prose and song.

—Nicole Rosevear, author of stories in Dispatches from Anarres: Tales in Tribute to Ursula K Le Guin and City of Weird: 30 Otherworldly Portland Tales

Nastashia bares the intricacies of their pleasures, desires, healing, grief, and survival. With each turn, we are caught between held-breaths and deep-exhales, suspended between voyeuristic glimpses and embodied resonance. Their poetry and songs fluidly weave textures, visions, and motions, defying the rigid violence imposed upon Black queer femmes. Prepare to wrestle with their unapologetic, raw, and deeply tender verses.

— Melody Li, LMFT, founder of Inclusive Therapists

Nastashia Minto’s powerful collection, A Body Tangled in Time, is a word-ritual healing through different planes of the human consciousness, the human heart, the striving healing human soul. Through her incantatory poems and songs, Minto moves through the physical, emotional, mental, intuitional, and spiritual planes of her experience, transcending the barriers and limitations of time, traveling back through transatlantic trauma and the persistent existence of being a Black empowered dyke in America today. These poems are gritty, raw, unflinching, tender, confronting, questioning, honest, sexually liberated, healing, and unapologetically Black. 

—Kai Coggin, author of Mining for Stardust, Incandescent, and Wingspan