Poetry. African &amp; African American Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. Women's Studies. In 1974, when Ntozake Shange first released the cannon of Black girl magic known as For colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, her opening stanza was a call to all of us. "somebody/ anybody sing a black girl's song bring her out to know herself ." This book is answer to that call. What is sacred, what is beauty, what is tragedy, what rites of passage have we endured to be initiated into the complexities of our humanity? Anastacia-Reneé's words frame so many questions, read like ritual, read like nursery rhymes, invoke ancestors and Becky alike in a nuanced honest reflection of this time in life. Using a reimagined alphabet, Anastacia-Reneé sets about taking on everything from love to cancer, monsters, growing up, growing into our bodies, and the ways in which even our bodies are not our own. Her words define and redefine, explore hidden truths and expose the lies we are raised with. These poems are stories of blackness, of queerness, of womanhood and the combination of all the identities we hold externally and internally that create the tapestry of who we are and who we want to be.

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Literature & Fiction

Renee, Anastacia

Poetry

Gramma Poetry

Poetry. "Bilingually laced and sensually pulled from the taut form of her enigmatic being, Stacey Tran's SOAP FOR THE DOGS is a refreshing gastronomic architecture made of razor-sharp, ancestral ingredients, chic aphoristic haikus, and narratively charged self-contained imperial, experimental lines of terse, stark prose. It's minimal without sacrificing depth and verve. It's energetic and lush without resorting to prolixity. It has the ability to expand, surprise, and transform itself after your eyes and hearts leave the page. Stacey Tran's first poetry collection is acutely warm, witty, inventive, piercing, and elegantly and acutely designed to congeal postmodernity with tradition, poetry with history, family with food while pulling you into the intimate, liminal, tight, flexible, and unexpected spaces of her brilliant imagination." --Vi Khi Nao

Soap for the Dogs

Tran, Stacey

Poetry. "'Magic isn't real,' Sadie Dupuis explains early on in MOUTHGUARD, and although we are apt to believe anything she says, it's hard to believe such a statement after reading these poems. This is a book where we encounter so many magical things, like 'the shadow on the moon,' a 'chariot / pulled by sphinxes,' 'the guts of a star,' 'a firefly skull,' 'horses and semen,' and 'the autumn lake of disconnect.' This is a book where magical poems drive us with a holy momentum towards a lonely road where on the side of it we can find a party of accidents that we are all invited to. This book is a party of poems where the poem pulls the strings and we move willingly like poem puppets. Dupuis' poems have a 'real heat' and after MOUTHGUARD you will be the 'live one on fire' and never 'what's cold in the coffin' and [You] will be thankful for this magic, for this poet, and for this book."--Dorothea Lasky

Mouthguard

Dupuis, Sadie

Poetry. Sarah Galvin is here, she's queer, and she would like to talk about something else for a moment! After taking a break from poetry to write The Best Party of Our Lives, a book of essays about gay marriages, Galvin's back with her second book of poems. In UGLY TIME, developers are transforming her hometown into a white-washed, glass box jungle. She's barely making rent. Her girlfriend just threw her heart in the garbage. Sex with strangers she meets on the internet is great and then empty and then great and then empty again. The 21st century is changing at hyperspeed, and it seems as if no one has time to talk about an old Kate Bush album or to praise "the patron saint of blowing up rotisserie chickens with fireworks" like they use to. But who's that beautiful person dressed head-to-toe in gold velvet? Did she just put Roy Orbison on the jukebox? Could love still be possible in the time of gentrification? And if so, does it redeem human suffering, sort of like, as Galvin writes, when "you step in human shit / while filming porn, / and notice the cherry petals / floating around you like sparks?" In a series of hilarious, tender, hyperreal poems, Galvin explores the paradox of trying to settle down—even for just a second—in a state of permanent impermanence.

Ugly Time

Galvin, Sarah

About the Author\nChristine Shan Shan Hou is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Previous publications include "I'm Sunlight" (The Song Cave, 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011), a collaborative artists' book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio, 2010).\nPoetry. Christine Shan Shan Hou's newest collection of poems, COMMUNITY GARDEN FOR LONELY GIRLS depicts a journey that traverses imagined histories and various states of consciousness. In Hou's poems, "the now moves with such glacial intensity"—folkloric myth and cultural detail are weaved together in animated modulation. These poems assert that desire for the unknown is pertinent to understanding one's identity and survival: "I know I could die, but if / I could be anything // I would be an aquarium full of / colorful fish and deep // breathing, / You know // like nude and / without age." Like a feminist spiritual quest or the act of a messenger delivering consequential information to a participant community, Hou's poems shape shift while simultaneously evoking its changeability: "I open my legs and a saint comes out / like a tiny blessing." Here, the subtle, gross, and causal body get in alignment despite the complexities and controversies of living a life. "Enough dilly-dallying. The love is coming."

Community Garden for Lonely Girls

Hou, Christine Shan Shan