Poetry Chapbooks

Seventeen Poems Not About a Lover

Available Now, Poetry Chapbooks, Sarah Thursday

Seventeen Poems Not About a Lover, by founder of Sadie Girl Press, Sarah Thursday, published by Arroyo Seco Press is a 38 page, perfect-bound chapbook. It includes paper-cut illustrations for each poem by Alyssandra Nighswonger. Available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

Seventeen Poems Not About a Lover is a collaboration between poet, Sarah Thursday, and artist, Alyssandra Nighswonger. After six years of friendship and artistic crushing, this dream project came to life. Though the poems intentionally avoid the topic of romantic love, they deal with love and loss from family and inner personal struggle. Each of the seventeen poems has a custom papercut illustration, hand-cut and photographed for a 3-D effect.

Alyssandra Nighswonger is a multi-media artist and adventure-lover from Long Beach, CA. This project was a swan dive into the heart and a journey in itself. The thing that Alyssandra admires the most about her friend Sarah is the way she takes her own personal challenges and creates an alchemy of the heart with her raw and fearlessly beautiful poetry. For Alyssandra, who can be a lot more timid with exposing the darker side of her emotions in her music and art and tends to hide meaning behind whimsy on the regular, this collaboration was a thematic challenge. It led to creating deeper layers in the illustrations, opening them up to being cut apart, and exposing that even the cutest wolf has a shadow, which developed this work into a papercut escapade. You can explore several of her musical projects and adventures at talesofalyssandra.com or follow her instagram @alyssssandra.

body of water

Chestina Craig, Poetry Chapbooks

body of water by Chestina Craig. 36-page, perfect bound chapbook of poetry and photography. Available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

“When you are a girl, you are born with a heavy that manifests in your arms and legs, in the hole in your stomach, and in the swells of your tongue. Craig gives a name to these manifestations. All these poems were born in the ocean or were born in her heart; sometimes I think both of these are the same. She counts the heavy, knows it, faces it, loves it in all the forms in comes into a woman’s body and somehow gives them words.” ~Farah Billah, author of Wrong Turns Lead Here

“In her poems, Chestina guides the reader through personal narrative with a sharp imagination that both shocks & surprises at every turn. I find myself discovering something new on every page—about the natural world, about love on one’s own terms, & about the celebration of self. Her poems are vulnerable & massive at the same time as she unpacks what it means to live & stay alive. She is unafraid to affirm her own right to take up space & she does so with a “knife-in-boot confidence” that is entirely her own.” ~Brandon Melendez, Berkeley Grand Slam Champion

“Chestina is a nuanced voice in the burgeoning poetry renaissance in Long Beach, California. Her work serves as a backdrop of landscapes natural and cerebral with the most intrinsic f-words laced intentionally throughout. She’s dope, read her words.” ~Antonio Cortez Appling, founder of The Long Beach Poetry Slam

Doe Eyed Venus

Available Now, Elmast Kozloyan, Poetry Chapbooks

Debut chapbook, Doe Eyed Venus, by Elmast Kozloyan. 18 pages, perfect bound with cover “Rorschach Test” art. 2nd edition printing in collaboration with Inside Lantern Press. Available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

“Elmast Kozloyan’s poetry is a feast of enchantment—her grasp for language, evidence she is not from this world entirely, but from a place of pure magic where words crowned her their queen.  Thankfully she has stepped away from that realm and into this one to share with us, Doe Eyed Venus.  This fine collection of poems explores the alchemy of a hungry youth into an empowered adult, one who is unafraid to find strength in her desires and learns to rule over them with grace.  And while I may be under her spell, I am of right mind when I say: Elmast is a poet to keep an eye on.” ~Eric Morago, Author of What We Ache For and Here For The Friction

How to Unexist

Poetry Chapbooks, Poetry Recordings, Sarah Thursday

Limited edition poetry with CD and chapbook, How to Unexist, by Sarah Thursday with music by BobKat. 12-track album, recorded and mixed by Blacksheep Music, with 20-page, full color, mini-chapbook. Art by Lynn Azali. Available online at the Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

“How to Unexist is no easy listen. Drawing from intensely personal reflections, the 24-minute album is a raw, articulate journey through Thursday’s psyche amid pain, heartbreak, self-acceptance and cognizance. Her cutting delivery doesn’t pander or add flair; the poet’s voice is truthful and clear. Juxtaposed with BobKat’s ambient soundscapes—largely improvisational layers of rhythmic acoustic guitar riffs, fiery violin melodies as well as some horn, bass synths and mandolin—her words sink with impact.” Esther Kang, Long Beach Post

Drunk on Ophelia

Ken Oddist Jones, Larry Duncan, Poetry Chapbooks

Chapbook, Drunk on Ophelia, by Larry Duncan with digital art by Ken Oddist Jones. 42 pages, perfect bound. Available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

“With Drunk on Ophelia, a work both delicate and bold, Larry Duncan has crafted a narrative written in the hot neon and rain splattered city streets—a place that lives in the haunted eyes of its inhabitants. This is the city split open, writhing, the fist through the wall, the gentle call of a lover through a door. Duncan is a master at naming all the unnameable things—always returning us to the body of experience. What you’re left with is the negative space—the here and not here, seen and unseen, the loved and the unloved. Drunk on Ophelia takes you so far down into humanity’s loneliness and heart break that when you emerge on the other side, blinking in the new light, you find yourself eerily whole.” Ally Malinenko, author of How To Be An American

“Drunk on Ophelia is a black and white movie projected onto the graffiti’d walls of an alleyway for nighthawks to enjoy after hours at diners still alive in obscurity, where sincere and visionary poets like Larry Duncan capture each and every midnight movie frame on cocktail napkins next to girl’s numbers written in stranger’s lipstick, poems that bleed with “the feel” of timeless lost souls who lurk in the last private corners not hit by the indifference of a California sunrise, where these poems make passionate, barroom sink love to an endangered muse dressed to the nines in perfect authenticity.  Duncan leaves you jealous that you’re not out there past midnight alongside him, but he’s generous enough to let us all tag along for a little while in this sensual collection of masterful, honest poetry.” Kevin Ridgeway, author of Contents Under Pressure (Crisis Chronicles Press)

Nature Studies

Available Now, Poetry Chapbooks, Terry Ann Wright

Debut chapbook, Nature Studies by Terry Ann Wright. 45 pages, perfect bound, 6×6 inches. Illustrated with Victorian style scientific drawings to compliment her biting poems. Available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

“Each poem in these “Nature Studies” is a precise scalpel of human relationships. We could say that this book is an anatomy/botany/cartography of attraction and rejection, of desire and oblivion. The poems are complex, vocative (many of them built in the “you” voice), rich in sound, piercing. The author exercises a sort of contemporary, Victorian contention to fully explore passion, disorder. It is in this movement between exposure and form where the pages of this book breathe, come to life. The reader hears echoes of William Blake (“The Sick Rose”) and Emily Dickinson (“Started Early-Took My Dog”) but most of all, we hear the distinctive voice of Terry Ann Wright–daring, unapologetic.” ~Mariano Zaro, author of Tres letras/Three Letters

Color version of bar napkins for beginners

Available Now, Graham Smith, Poetry Chapbooks

Now available: bar napkins for beginners, by Graham Smith, with all color illustrations by Fernando Gallegos! All the images are saturated with vibrant color made from watercolor pencils. The artist created unique illustrations for Graham’s haiku that “evoke the feeling of movement and emotion.” (out of print)GS_BlackVelvetWingsGS_AStormySeaOfStrangers

Watermarked

Art Booklets, Available Now, Poetry Chapbooks

Chapbook of poetry and full-color art, Watermarked, by Kelsey Bryan-Zwick. 44 pages, full-color, perfect bound. (out of print)

“To read Kelsey Bryan-Zwick’s poems is to step aboard a bullet train, put on the poet’s kaleidoscope glasses, and see her images flashing by like countryside outside the train windows. Here, in stunning language, are poems of thoughtful introspection and reminiscence, little biographies and travelogues, musings touched with wit and whimsy. In “Synthesis”, the poet would go so far as to weave my hair into a nest/ with twig and olive branch… Likewise, her poems are woven with magic and grit, insight and light.”  ~  Ricki Mandeville, author of A Thin Stand of Lights

The Language I Was Broken In: A Sadie Girl Sampler

Available Now, Poetry Chapbooks

The Language You Broke Me In: A Sadie Girl Sampler is a 36 page collection of poetry by poets published or soon-to-be published by Sadie Girl Press. Available in a limited edition, hand-stitched binding version. Includes previous and upcoming poets, Nancy Lynée Woo, Sarah Thursday, Raquel Reyes-Lopez, Graham Smith, JL Martindale, Daniel McGinn, Kelsey Bryan-Zwick, and Terry Ann Wright. Illustrated by frequent Sadie Girl Press artist, Fernando Gallegos. Limited editions available through Sadie Girl Press Bookstore.

The Bottle & The Boot

Available Now, Poetry Chapbooks

Special limited edition release chapbook and spoken word CD, The Bottle & The Boot, by JL Martindale & Daniel McGinn. 28 pages, stapled and folded, with spoken word CD. Music performed and written by BobKat, produced by Blacksheep Music Productions. (out of print)

“The Bottle & The Boot is an amazing collaboration between two very talented poets. It  moves between collaborative poems, with the poets alternating lines, all based on the phrase “sometimes I breathe,” and single-author poems which utilize shared imagery. Therefore, certain images repeat throughout, breath and breathing of course, but also moths, the moon, weeds and an empty bottle (or a bottle in the process of being emptied). This provides a unity to the overall work, but each time the images are put to different uses, given different significance and meaning.” -G. Murray Thomas