First Reviews Are (Coming) In for Punks

Punks has been out roughly two and a half weeks, but it has begun to receive some very good, thoughtful reviews. They include 

• a fine review, the very first official one, on the Poetry Foundation's Harriet site by David Woo; 
• a starred review in Publishers Weekly; 
• a selection as one of Entropy's (soon to be RIP) Best Poetry Books of the last two years;
• one of Hyperallergic's Favorite Poetry Books of 2021 picks, reviewed by Albert Mobilio;
• and a wonderful initial review by the incomparable Samuel R. Delany on Facebook.

If you had asked me back in January or June what I thought might be the response, I'd probably have said I'd be happy if it sold through the first printing. This isn't false modesty but my earnest acknowledgement of the (years') long and arduous process it took for this book to make it into print. As it also turns out, however, it is Small Press Distributor's BEST SELLER for the month of November! Many thanks to all of the publications, reviewers and readers so far!

Please consider purchasing a copy ($20), from The Song Cave (it ships internationally too) or other retailers, and do recommend it to others if you think they might be interested and ask your local bookstores and libraries to order copies if you can! 

Thanks so much!

Punks' Official Debut

It's official! Punks, my new book of poems is officially in the world! You can order a copy directly from my publisher The Song Cave, via Small Press Distributors, and from bookstores (such as Barnes & Noble to Powells.com, etc., as well as the behemoth) around the country!

This collection, which includes a selection of collaborative poems with the late poet Cynthia Gray, experienced many false starts over the years on the way to publication, but once I connected with The Song Cave editors, talented poets in their own right Alan Felsenthal and Ben Estes, Punks was on the road to publication!

Please consider ordering a copy or at least urging your local bookstores--very important to support them--and your local libraries to order copies if you can. If copies are in bookstores people will see them and consider buying them and if libraries purchase them far more people have the opportunity to read them!

Many thanks to everyone who helped me and this book along the way, and enjoy! 

Quote: Michelle Cliff + RIP

-- Copyright © Michelle Cliff, from "If I Could Write This in Fire I Would Write This in Fire," from Homegirls: A Black Feminist Anthology, edited by Barbara Smith, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1983. All rights reserved.

(In memoriam to Michelle Cliff, who passed away on June 12, 2016. Born on November 2, 1946, in Kingston, Jamaica Cliff would go on to a long and important career as one of the major queer Jamaican-American and Caribbean-American novelists, short story writers, and essayists of her generation.

Michelle Cliff (1946-2016

Cliff's articulations of feminist and queer intersectionalities in relation to history and society played important roles in the development of Black Diasporic feminist thought and writing, and her ongoing experimental approach to her fiction, like her political engagement and ethical example offered models for all who have followed her. Her partner, the great poet Adrienne Rich, predeceased her in 2012.

Among my favorite of her works of fiction are her first book, Abeng, published in 1985 and which I first came across when I was in college--though not in a college class, but on a bookstore shelf--and the very playful and inventive The Store of a Million Items, from 1998. Her last book, the novel Into the Interior, appeared in 2010.)