2021 GLCA New Writers Award for Creative Nonfiction
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2019
Small Press Distribution Bestseller
“Be prepared to fully immerse yourself in a world that’s both gorgeous and dangerous, led by a guide who has found herself at the outermost edges of what language can bear. I’ve never read anything quite like it. Nina Boutsikaris is a compelling new voice in creative nonfiction.”
“No one is safe from Nina Boutsikaris’ gaze in this book—she looks at the world and people around her just as intensely as she turns her gaze inward, questioning her desires, her actions, and asking what it means to see something for what it truly is. I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry pairs art with experience, youth with introspection, and gender with power—the dance between these topics makes for an utterly absorbing read.”
“An intelligent and radical rumination on gender, sexuality, fear, and romance. A topical and evocative book for anyone with a brain.”
“I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry’ will immerse you within Boutsikaris’ experiences, leaving you to wonder about your own that may even be uncomfortably similar. Exploring the male gaze, she uses theory to explore her own encounters, desires, and decisions. This is a quick but beautiful read that uses absorbing prose that creates a powerful voice of female sexuality and being.”
No Kill Magazine, Culture Dose
“Visceral, empathetic, judgmental, kind, compassionate, searching -- this book embodies the dissonance of living in this world, what it means to feel so much in so many different directions, and to find any way to relate it to what has been felt before and what might be felt in the future.”
Devin Kelly, In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen
“...words leak from Boutsikaris—words on family, fragility, art history, good sex, bad sex, desire, abuse, fidelity, friendship, theft, manipulation, friction—and they plink across the pages.”
Austyn Gaffney for Pleiades, Vol. 40, Issue 1, 2020
“This is a writer willing to forgive the parts of her we read on page, and quietly asking us, the readers, to be as forgiving with ourselves.”
Meher Manda for the Atticus Review, Jul 4, 2019
“I’m Trying to Tell You I’m Sorry is both bold and spare, the troubling story of a young woman trying to find and lose herself in New York City. The prose has clear elegance like water, and the brief scenes are a testament to the power and pitfalls of being beautiful in a world all too ready to take.”
Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award Judges, 2021