Bøger udgivet af Really Serious Literature

BIOAnna Schenck was born a free spirit into a life engulfed in restraint. Growing up in the PNW on an island in Washington state with her 2 siblings, Anna found herself surrounded by a small community and large religious influence. Words became an early escape from a life of confusion and chaos. She immersed herself in literature and film that allowed her to see a life beyond the little island she called home. By age 7, Anna was writing to make sense of her life experiences and navigate her way into the world. SYNOPSISIn her first full length publication, Hurricane Girl, Anna chronicles her life of wild abandon, in a delicate but chaotic rhythm. Anna isn't afraid to expose the truth of self-exploration and difficulty in maintaining self-acceptance. Anna will take you to the darkest hours of insecurity then to the sincerest moments of humility, all with a veil of cynical nurturing that only a woman who has lived a lot of life in a short time, can bring.Anna has found her way back to that small island in Washington with a new sense of vigor. She is working as a nurse, continuing her education, still writing her way through life's challenges, and raising a fierce young woman to use her words too.PRAISE:¿"The name Anna Schenck is defined exactly how it sounds - Anna: a sweet little girl living in the clouds with daffodils in her hair, and Schenck: stabbing an inmate to the ICU with a toothbrush rubbed to a sharp point by prison flooring. Anna uses these tools to describe her journey through late teenage angst and arriving at an exhausted finish line of love, worry, and motherhood. She explains her tales moment by moment like a canary in a coal-mine; screaming when the air is toxic and then lullaby you to safety in a way that only your mother can hum her classic tune as if she is the sandman bringing you to sleep."¿¿Emma Bianchi, Poetry Laboratory

With a title like The Air is Smokey Because We Don't Love Each Other Enough, it's no surprise that these poems deal candidly and unapologetically with the conundrum of living in our times (and I love it). Dark humor looms in Gusta's lines, and you'll find that you may recognize your friends, your lovers, and yourself in the attitudes and anecdotes that inhabit these pages. Intriguing, clever, and achingly relevant, this collection is essential reading for everyone who's ever been stranded on a burning planet.-Rena Priest, Washington State Poet Laureate and author of Patriarchy BluesChris Gusta's acerbic wit is laced with tenderness in this collection of poems exploring love, loneliness, and the societal norms we take for granted. In "New Things in the World of Disease," Gusta wonders if "my well of experiences has been poisoned / and if everything interesting has already passed," only to remember the night "I laid in a giant puddle of spilled Dr. Pepper / on a movie theater floor in nothing but my underwear / so, there is always novelty". By turns poignant and hilarious, these poems peel back the polite exterior we present to the world and revel in the beauty of brutal truth-telling. After all, as Gusta writes in "Roll Away the Stone," "burying isn't better, / we just don't have to see it happen anymore." -Elizabeth Vignali, author of House of the SilverfishC. Gusta is a high school English teacher in the northwest corner of Washington. He has been published in several magazines and on numerous websites, such as Hoarse, Poetrynight, and Vice, as well as self-releasing a number of chat books and editing the late poetry zine Your Hands, Your Mouth. He enjoys a good sweater, and staring off into the void.cover: Leah Wilemon.

If people were still banning and burning books, Vodicka's Dear Ted would be at the top ofthe shortlist. Lars Von Trier will option this book. Pasolini would be proud.-Kim Göransson, photography and music production at feral sleep studyVodicka's Dear Ted is not a genuflecting murder ballad. It's not a hyperbolic elegy to thecult of personality that exists around a spectral boogeyman in pleated slacks. It IS aferocious take-no-prisoners deconstruction of the sycophantic idol worship that growslike kudzu around killers that often obscures the survivors, victims, and vindicators.Vodicka is the definition of fearless. A poet who wields words like hammers andmetaphors like lead pipes in the hands of angels. A not-to-be-missed collection.-S.A. Cosby, New York Times bestselling author of Razorblade Tears andBlacktop WastelandWith Dear Ted, Vodicka grabs her hot pink poetry brush and paints important feminineenergy all over the often male-focused world of serial killers. It's a collection that offerspoignant statements on violence against women in art and pop culture. Dear Ted takes thepower away from men, both serial killers and serial daters alike. It's a killer read and anempowering one, too.-Gina Tron, true crime staff writer for Oxygen and author of Suspect, Employment, and Star 67Results of the autopsy are in: Kim Vodicka is the real killer, slaying with necromanticwordplay illegal in most states, including the states of denial, arousal & psychosis.-Jack Skelley, author of Fear of Kathy AckerVodicka's feral wit and fetishistic wordplay don't just sugarcoat her bitter pills oflacerating truth; they seduce you and wreck your defenses as she smears period bloodon the valorization of misogynistic monsters and vivisects the rancid romantic carnagecommitted by the sociopathic shitshows that walk among us. But if it's wrong to beturned on by this poetic orgy of nightmares and accusations, I don't know how to beright.-Cody Goodfellow, Wonderland Book Award-winning author ofUnamerica and All-Monster ActionIt is impossible to choose between the three "circles" presented in Vodicka's electrifyingcollection Dear Ted. Every section of this book is dangerous, chaotic, and compulsory.Every poem is an essential marriage of brutal honesty and elaborate humor.-Gabriel Ricard, author of Bondage Night and Disgruntled ColumnistVodicka relentlessly probes emotional violence in this long-form, experimental poem, inflicting on the reader what destructive relationships do to the women involved. Thebook requires a commitment to gross anatomy, mental gymnastics, breaking one's ownhall of mirrors about the harm we cause, request and inflict. "Do you know how muchwork / goes into revisiting the scene / of a murder?" Vodicka asks as a demand, as shefearlessly confesses her crimes committed and consumed.-Nettie Zan Powers, author of Victimless Crime

Thankful for this book, and Michael Chang's ability to weave seamlessly in between scenes, to honor the full ecosystem of a narrative-people, places, images, metaphor. This is a rich book, it felt like stepping into a generous and welcoming world. -HANIF ABDURRAQIBMichael Chang's debut collection is bold, unapologetic, and vibrantly defiant. An interrogation into the confines that govern us on our nation's journey to racial and gender equality. -RICHARD BLANCOThis book attempts to have more fun and fuck more shit up than any debut collection I've ever read. Michael Chang's irreverence is an ethos, their way of pushing back against a culture that finds them "disposable ... not colored/White enough ... not the arbiter of anything ..." Against that tide, Chang stands the fuck up and says things most poets wouldn't dream of saying, in the process queering American poetry in a bracingly necessary way. -JASON KOOMichael Chang hits hard and refuses to apologize. Unabashedly crass, brash, provocative and funny, these poems, beneath their comic exteriors, explore an American landscape full of joy and despair-never flinching from the big subjects of desire, belonging, sexuality and race. Chang takes everything in, somehow managing to console even as they trouble us. Once you start reading, it's hard to look away. As they write: "I will dominate you. I will come back." -BRUCE SNIDERThis collection is, and I mean this literally, everything: grief-full and endlessly flirtatious, an epic ars poetica with an undercurrent of hero's journey, incisive critique of white supremacy and PoBiz, a little hurty and hurt, bursting with heart and language lavish with tinder and fire. We don't need Whitman. We've got Michael Chang to take us beyond the beyond. We're heading out now. It's "time for the beautiful revenge of self-love." -TC TOLBERT

"To hold Donkey-Girl in your hands is to touch viscera. this book is primal in a way only Anna Mirzayan can be, a dizzying voice unbridled by convention or form. I have looked into the eyes of Donkey-Girl and Other Hybrids and I have seen the caves of god."Elle Nash, author of ''Animals Eat Each Other'' and ''Nudes''"Anna Mirzayan''s Donkey-Girl breaks new ground by composing poems in tandem with artificial intelligence that compel us to reassess the relationship of poetry to philosophy. At the same time, this poetry expands our fractal consciousness about sexuality, the body, feminism and capitalism while remaining accessible and even humorous. This book is a wonderful exploration of all kinds of boundaries and I recommend it highly. Enjoy your sojourn into the way these poems speak to you and to each other. I did! You will read Donkey-Girl and come out changed."Gigi Bradford, former Director, Literature Program, National Endowment for the Arts"You had me at ''cunt''."Charlene Elsby, Ph.D., author of Hexis, Affect and Psychros."Anna Mirzayan''s poems construct and inhabit a fascinating world in which the real meets the unreal, the sublime meets the grotesque, the mechanical meets the biological, and the horrific meets the hilarious. Gleefully Cronenbergian and beautifully visceral."Marzi Margo, author of Blueberry Lemonade

Gym Bras is an exercise diary in poems and, more urgently, an exercise in confronting internalized fatphobia. In her third full-length collection, Crystal Stone candidly explores body dysmorphia, disordered eating, and shame-based exercise habits while flexing on the mythos that women should be seen and not heard (but still look hot). In a culture that worships thinness, weaponizes calorie-counting, and make impossible beauty standards mandatory, Stone wavers between body negativity and positivity, feelings of powerlessness and empowerment, in a way that is not only honest, but deeply felt in the fabric of femme identity. -Kim Vodicka, author of The Elvis Machine Stone''s third collection of poems is both feminist and honest, meta and subtle, unflinching and vulnerable. The theme is quickly articulated with its title Gym Bras followed by the table of contents-which reads like a workout diary, "Rest Day," "Chest & Back Day," "Booty Day" and so on. The sections of poems are then divided with quick sketches of gym bras: Racerback, Compression, Encapsulation, etc. The first "Leg Day" poem gives readers further insight into the theme, "I''m always trying / to flatten my chest. Today, to run." The last "Leg Day" poem leaves the reader unsettled with little resolution, a nod to the cycle we often find ourselves in trying to conform to the demands of a superficial society, "Our bodies blended / liquid. The world a slow / moving container." Creative and unexpected, the narrative of these poems will pull you in.-Trish Hopkinson, author of FootnoteIn Gym Bras, Crystal Stone offers a vulnerable and accessible chronicling of one woman''s determination to claim her own body-at the gym, of course, but also in the bedroom. Stone''s poems are targeted workouts: leg days, arm days, rest days, a structure that supports the manuscript''s central dilemma: do we compress ourselves to pull our strength inward or to please a world that wants us smaller? In all of it, Stone declares "we''re not just women. We''re poets...we put our hair in haibuns...We don''t rest, we caesura. We...punctuate our faces, our voices."  -Sherre Vernon, author of Green Ink Wings and The Name is PerilousProvocative yet intimate, Crystal Stone pulls her own bra on and off throughout this collection of embodied, unapologetic poems. The speaker of Gym Bras runs and lifts, reckoning with the pressure of being within the body she has. As she moves through her workout and rest days, struggling to carve out a space for women athletes while feeling comfortable within her own body, her anxiety becomes our own. Stone depicts moments of empowerment but also doubt and failure as she grapples with misogyny. "It''s hard unlearning," Stone writes, "what I grew up hearing." Can she ever win? We root for our speaker as she struggles to undo the damage of a culture that requires her to be ever stronger, ever smaller.  -Stacey Balkun, author of Sweetbitter

Welcome to the Aftermath - an outside-time war-ravaged city that both is-and-is-not the Pacific Northwest of today, and things are bleak. Framed by a series of film photographs by Justin Plinz, photos that seem at first like they could've been taken in the past (until easily-missed details like a cat tractor at the edge of a frame, a website on a poster on the side of a chapel, or the too new cars give it away), this book and these poems by Graham Isaac "question my hometown's innocence" by exploring a city and its people in the wake of war. But it's hard not to read this book as an allegory for Seattle in the era of Amazon and the tech boom. "Things grew and businesses thrived and large buildings came and we felt important. Companies hired and fired and churches and cults and sports, so many sports." And "architecture enthusiasts took photos / of the city's largest shelter, stepping / over those sleeping outside it." I could be biased since I live here. Whether it is or isn't, these poems grapple with the past and present of what a place - a home - is, what it means to its people, and what it can and should be. Amber Nelson, author of The Sexiest Man Alive For years now, Graham has haunted the corners and alleys of every city he's lived in, his fragmentary, laconic narratives by turns hilarious, haunting and heartbreaking. I never thought I'd be glad to see Filthy Jerry again, but man, it's timely.Wood Ingham, room207 pressThis book begins on a jagged edge and ends on a surprisingly sweet sigh. Its observations are satisfying while mocking any sentimentality that erupts. This is a parallel city that is too close to home for comfort. You are immersed in the narrative staples of Tarty Jane, Filthy Jerry, and Goloth the Destroyer, but again, it is a discomforting reckoning. They are simply background characters on the stage of a bleak city. Waves of narrative, of history, call back to each other, tie together with a dirty, unstable thread. By the end I really wanted Filthy Jerry to find a damn coat. This book is fucking brilliant. Courtney A. Butler, author of Wild Horses

Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet''s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. She teaches Creative Writing and Literature in New Hampshire, has facilitated writing workshops through Youthspeaks and has helped to pioneer poetry workshops in several public schools in California and Michigan. Nadine holds an M.F.A. from University of Michigan''s Hellen Zell Writer''s Program where she was awarded the Faraar award for playwriting. Her hybrid poem play "Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason" was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the co-author with Karen Weiser of "Beneath the Bright Discus" (Potes & Poets Press, 2000), and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find her poems published in Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, Poor Mojo''s Almana(k), Really Serious Literature, and the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario. Her dissertation, Calling out the State: Postmodern American Anthropoetics landed her a Ph.D. from the University of Washington.On one hand Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a literary Latinx dominatrix having her way with language and patriarchy while scrupulously avoiding the scourge of sentences. On the other hand she''s alive in a decaying capitalistic empire trying to survive without frying her adrenals with her: "mouth open to every time everywhere." Singing despite not knowing all the notes. Surviving despite not being a white guy in a masculinist culture dying before our eyes. Emerging: "full of sunlight ringing." She might bemoan books as "useless butter," but this is a 21st century poet with a debut book you should read before the alphabet crumbles.-- Paul E Nelson, Founder of SPLAB, author of A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia, American Prophets (Interviews 1994-2012) and American Sentences.This is a poetry of "quiet sounds bursting," the poems flutter and flatter as lullabies, then jar by a sudden "you are my kiss sour lemon quench," and we''re mesmerized, seduced by the dreamsong of Maestas'' music, a music that finds our "most midnight of places" and "knots our toes in canticles"-Thomas Walton (author of All the Useless Things Are Mine)Cover by Janet Nechama Miller.

"CAKE is alive and crackling with absurdity and unpredictability, operating at a speed and on a scale we don't often find. Like a contemporary Dadaist experiment revealing the doomed 21st century to itself, CAKE is a daring and irreverent expression of discontent, with subterranean seriousness and wisdom."- Lindsay Lerman, I'm From Nowhere"Cake has better mixed medium literary work than a group of MFA grads, better speculative/futurist anti-capitalist theory than a group of Thomas Piketty's, and more believable elegies for what may be wrought from a dead technological age than even the most heartbroken of modern cynics."- Robert Lashley, Up South"Cake! Who doesn't like cake? The best cakes are multilayered, and this cake is no different. It's a rich mélange of rich nutty humor, creamy fugues of vertiginous erudition, generous thrusts of tangy provocation, rich swirly comedies of toasted coconut and pure Dada extract. It's got songs and dreams and sinister experiments. It's got a seasoned wit and an unseasonable "wormwood sun." How many things go wonderfully wrong in this book? As many things that go wonderfully right, and taste like a lush creamy sentence on the tongue, a wavy oscillation of chaos and strawberries. You know what I like best about this collection? It's chock full of the madness of imagination, the light of the bakery never dims, and every slice is served on a universe of words."- John Olson, Larynx Galaxy