Helen of Bikini examines the way humans inhabit the world, both in beauty and in conflict. How do the twinned human forces of domestication and domination, rage and mediation, witness and culpability, destruction and nurturing, find their balances, not in an either/or, but in a melding? In an unapologetically feminist approach to these topics, Reeves explores the idea that "we are the only ones who name," and goes about teaching us the "alphabet of our unmaking."
"In her finely wrought debut poetry collection, Helen of Bikini, Phoebe Reeves showers us with the hard rain of atomic fallout, juxtaposed with a compendium of flora and fauna, invoked and named with a painstaking commitment to their beautiful existence."
— Cynthia Bargar, author of Sleeping in the Dead Girl's Room