Holli Carrell’s debut explores Mormon girlhood, the American West, matriarchal lineage, indoctrination, estrangement, and the ramifications of a patriarchal American religious ideology. Interweaving prose, documentary poems, translations, and erasures, Carrell unpacks the fraught history of gender and polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormonism, exposing the sexual predation of Joseph Smith, Mormonism’s founder. "Apostasies" celebrates doubt, disobedience, and bodily autonomy.