The Case of the Mystery Tampon!! by B. Burns

PRESS 254 Handmade Creative Nonfiction Chapbook. 32 Pages. Saddle Stitched.

“That Burns can lay out this much theorized reality for us, and connect the dots between environs and rape and relations, while working in a tone that invites us to be intimately acquainted with her narrator, is a wonderful gift to us.”
—Kass Fleisher, author of Dead Woman Hollow and founding publisher of Steerage Press

The Case of the Mystery Tampon!! explores rape in a memoir that reveals the relationship between different types of abuse—sexual, familial, and societal—that all seem interrelated. In a compelling voice that is at once as candid as it is familiar, Burns invites readers to a high school hotel party that will change her life in both small and profound ways. In the aftermath, Burns struggles to process what she has experienced and find a genuine ally in the midst of a toxic home life and a healthcare system that seeks to control and define her life experience on terms that aren’t her own.