Slippery Tongues is an exquisite chapbook of erasure poetry, full of words plucked directly from a 600-year-old book called Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches. Malleus Maleficarum is an instructional tome in the practice of witch-hunting, but words of female empowerment lurk within the text, waiting to be excised and twisted and spun with cutting sarcasm. This collection of poems opens a door into a realm of feminism, magic, sex, and demons. Though the words come from the 1400s, Pacheco’s arrangement allows them to illuminate the power imbalance of gender in the 21st century.

-Lauren Andrea, Stonecoast Review