Poetry

Weaving wisdom from her shamanic practice and the interstices of language, and in the difficult moments anticipating the deaths of her beloved dog companions, Separation Anxiety marks the first collection of poetry from acclaimed prose writer Janice Lee, and is a meditation on inhabitation and existence beyond the human.

Adrian Ernesto Cepeda, author of La Belle Ajar, brings you a horror death themed collection with mortality, murder, and muerte oozing from every one of these terrifying verses.

Inspired by NightWorms, Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties & Nick Cave’s Murder Ballads, get ready to be haunted by serial killers, fatal femmes, poisoners, as these premeditated murderesses that slay you in terrifying poems. One step inside these grave inspired verses, you will want to re-experience We Are the Ones until the very end.

Embrace the terror and prepare to be Possessed, Cepeda’s poems will mesmerize you with his bone-chilling death rhymes from the other side.

“It was the year us girls had a feminine desire to go missing,” Vanessa Roveto, acclaimed author of bodys, begins her book within the remnants of a car crash, fragmenting identity, grief, and heart.

Beginning with the death of daddy, the “I” soon meshes with whatever and whomever she comes into contact with—strangers, actors, a Covid crush. She absorbs these people and objects, dispersing them into the Southern California landscape, the Uncanny Valley, warping time and naturalizing dreams.

Documenting a period of both global and personal loss, Roveto crafts a book-length poem that weighs heavier than the Ego in L.A. Splintering Self between Other and palm trees in the summer heat, Mulholland Dive spins a Lynchian setting within a feminine eruption of alluring language, fluked romance, and the aftershocks of grief.

Each poem in this manuscript takes up another poet’s work— a selection that ranges from Lorca to CD Wright, Hồ Xuân Hương to Sappho, Agha Shahid Ali to Ishrat Afreen— and alters its DNA, infusing it with an other idiolect. This is an idiolect of pleasure (the wordplay, puns, and cadence of the Vietnamese language) and of pain (the long shadow of the Vietnam war in the lives of those who survived, barely survived, and became refugees). Like any possessing spirit, WAR IS NOT MY MOTHER speaks in tongues: using others’ words to articulate a personal pain. Shorn of their original context and content, the poems in this collection— mutant-hybrids who retain a trace of their skeleton while dressed in entirely other clothes— become a play of voices that call into question notions of authenticity and self in poetic production, a postmodern twist for the classical craft.

Fence poetry editor and rising star Michael Chang’s Almanac of Useless Talents is a must-read for poetry lovers and newbies alike. 

This is a useless Almanac. There’s no seasonal data, only poems good for leaving the club in haute couture with mid-level poets, for ambiguous sex, mouthy seductions, shoulder-turns of cold cock disrespect.

Part confessional, part experimental, and completely original, Chang is a poet read in classrooms and on phone screens with equal fervor. Each poem deftly deforms self into outrageous performance. This poetry snaps and twists so fast you’ll miss things: the intricate formal craft, the bitchy wordplay. A dopamine rush delving into desire’s throbbing networks of flesh and circuit, identity, relationships, Aznness, queerdom, and more that would arouse Ashbery envy, Chang’s playful style is edgy, surprising, and delightful. In Chang’s world, sentiment is décor: come face the amusing ever-ache of our desires or go ahead and try to outrun them.

Initially influenced by the wild cutup language of William S. Burroughs, Sampsell soon discovered countless modern collagists that inspired him to take his art further and further from where it started. Years later, he finds himself at the center of a growing movement of 21st Century cut and paste.
I Made an Accident showcases over 200 of Sampsell's collages, exploring a range of styles: hilarious sight gags, subtle cultural jabs, elegant mysteries, colorful surprises, fragmented hauntings, and gloriously strange accidents. Combined with Sampsell's sharp and lively poems, this book is a feast for the eyes and brain and a nonstop entertainment.    

On the bank of the shore & the ice of the lake. Between love & nostalgia. Beside the toad & the squirrel. Between loss. Next to a stranger. In the scent of grapefruit vodka seltzer. Between the sunrise & high noon. In the shape of the bed in the shape of my former body. By the edge. All the places I wish I died.

The Smallest of Bones guides those on an intimate journey of body acceptance, with sparse words dedicated to peeling back skin and diving bone-deep into the self. Raw, honest, and powerful, this collection is an offering to those struggling to find power in the darkness.

Generative rather than directive, the poem magnifies the small, overlooked moments in life; explores flickering thoughts, impressions, impulses; and wallows joyfully in unending confusion.

Daniel Knauf brings the darkness and surrealism fans have grown to love, but brings a vulnerability and intimacy that makes each poem memorable and enjoyable. It is noir with heart and a coda for the soul. Darkness and light vying for dominance in poems that go from personal and confessional to rambunctiously fantastical. A heady dive into the abyss of love and other monsters. Daniel Knauf is a true storyteller.

La Belle Ajar is a collection of poems inspired by Plath’s 1963 novel that reimagines the journey of Esther Greenwood within the empowering odyssey of these 20 scintillating cento poems that honor the voice and legacy of America’s most influential modern poet and author: Sylvia Plath.

Sad Sexy Catholic follows the journey of a young twenty-something as she navigates the already difficult task of existing made even harder by trauma, body dysmorphia, a personality disorder, and leftover guilt from a religious upbringing. The speaker in these poems strives to find softness, even in the darkest of moments.

Readers are taken aboard into a microcosm where wonder meets waterlogged torment and self-harm; where grief, euphoria and longing coexist; where womanhood is as joyful and dizzying an experience as it is searing; where peeling the layers of cultural identity is like plunging into the most opaque and briny deep. While the act of remembering has solitary, melancholy tinges, Aïcha Martine Thiam’s pen never wavers, nor does it stray far from the impulse to bear witness, to do justice, and to connect with kindred souls.