Seamlessly shifting between the speculative and the blindingly real, balancing the bizarre with the frightening mundane, A Manual for How to Love Us presents a tender portrait of women trying their best to love and be loved in the most difficult of circumstances. In this weird and unpredictably linked collection, poet Erin Slaughter dissects the trope of the soft-spoken, sorrowful woman in distress, queering the domestic and honoring the feral in every body. Within each story, grieving women embrace their wild to begin enacting control, even as the narratives begin to bleed into one another. One woman gigs as “a gazer” at a fraternity house, another slowly moves into her otherworldly stained-glass art, one couple only speaks in their basement’s black box, and a thruple must decide what to do when one partner disappears. Women in this collection suffer unclean breaks, whisper secrets to the ghosts of their fathers tangled in the knots of their hair, eat raw beef to get closer to their inner wolves, and build deadly MLM schemes along the Gulf Coast. Set mostly in the southern, “flyover” states of America, these are women living on the edge and clinging to the brink. Lyrical, voicey, and surprisingly humorous, A Manual for How to Love Us is an exciting debut from a poet on the rise.