To support those who need us most, Sundress Publications and Agape Editions are donating proceeds from all of our November book sales to charity. We have asked our authors to choose causes they care deeply for. Proceeds from their titles will be donated to the charities listed to the right. All remaining book sales will benefit Stand With Standing Rock.
Political Punch: Contemporary Poems on the Politics of Identity
Edited by Fox Frazier-Foley & Erin Elizabeth Smith
Contributors include Kenzie Allen, Jasmine An, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Ahi Baraka, Anne Barngrover, Jennifer Bartlett, Scott Bear Don’t Walk, Erin Belieu, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo, Jennifer Jackson Berry, Callista Buchen, Cortney Larmar Charleston, Sarah A. Chavez, Chen Chen, Alicia Cole, CA Conrad, Oliver De La Paz, Emile DeWeaver, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Amber Flame, Lisa A. Flowers, Yolanda J. Franklin, Jennie Frost, Carmen Gimenez-Smith, Arielle Greenberg , M. Ayodele Heath, Sara Henning, Jeb Herrin, Elizabeth Hoover, Mark Irwin, Allison Joseph, Bhanu Kapil, Vandana Khanna, Ayisha Knight-Shaw, EJ Koh, Kristin LaTour, Kenji C. Liu, Timothy Liu, M. Mack, Shahé Mankerian, Shane McCrae, Freesia McKee, Lynn Melnick, Philip Metres, Hoa Nguyen, Jennifer Perrine, Saba Syed Razvi, Jessica Reidy, Lois Roma-Deeley, Danny A. Romero, Lee Ann Roripaugh, Danielle Sellers, Glenn Shaheen, Raena Shirali, Karen Skolfield, Christopher Soto, aka Loma, Anna B. Sutton, Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie, Emma Trelles, Donna Vorreyer, Jim Warner, Ginny Wiedhardt, Hanif Willis-Abdurraquib, and Emily Jungmin Yoon.
Proceeds from this title support the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Posada: Offerings of Witness and Refuge
by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo
“I am moved by Xochitl-Julisa’s work, her embrace of familia, of places long gone and present, of abandoned things too, near or in a neighborhood house yet filled with luminous power as a ‘black lava molcajete,’ a ‘mano,’ and many kinds of cacti—enduring, inscrutable, fierce, & makers of nectar. Perhaps her verses are gazing at the border-crosser—perhaps at you and me. I found joy in Bermejo’s work, her caring journeys, places I have traveled. Her touch is that of an artist. Unique, light, and expansive in its humanity. ¡Bravissimo, Xochitl-Julisa!”
– Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States
Proceeds from this title support No More Deaths.
At Whatever Front
by Les Kay
“Les Kay’s beautiful and formally diverse first full-length collection reads as a love letter to the working class, full of steel and wood, mortar and chrome. In his skilled hands, drudgery becomes liturgy, the burdens of poverty become cascading light, and fists become ‘flowers that we can’t open.’”
—Danielle Deulen
Proceeds from this title support the Southern Poverty Law Center.
No More Milk
by Karen Craigo
“In ‘Micromanaging the Garden,’ Karen Craigo writes ‘I just / want something to grow here, / and it should be beautiful / in its dailiness, and durable, / surprising.’ No description I could give of these lovely poems could be more accurate than this. But I will say, though this book’s cover tells us No More Milk, don’t believe it. These poems remind us that poetry, like milk, is one of our most fundamental forms of sustenance, and there is plenty here.”
—Henrietta Goodman
Proceeds from this title support the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In the Crocodile Gardens
by Saba Syed Razvi
“Infused with a taste of the mystical and infiltrated by tendrils of literary allusion, this elegant collection feels beyond time— and yet it also faces contemporary challenges with uncommon delicacy & insight. And whether it’s treating the war in Afghanistan or the goddess Persephone, each poem conveys an intimacy, a proximity: Razvi’s voice is very, very close to her reader, almost whispering these vibrant images and compelling, highly crafted phrases.”
—Cole Swensen
Proceeds from this title support the Islamic Relief Fund.
Suites for the Modern Dancer
by Jill Khoury
“Many of these poems unfold in Rose Valley, a psych ward mythic as Ginsberg’s Rockland. Rose Valley is the tip of a spoon scraping cherry ice, a red dress with a razor in the hem, a grand balustrade that the poet—an ‘anima mala’ richly arrayed in her own ‘nerves and gemlets’—promenades, tap-sweeping her white cane. These poems are narcotic. Linguistic ambition and pain tangle up in them. Is it wrong to luxuriate in work shot through with pain? I can’t help it. I am glad to witness real bodies in these poems. I like very much that they are full of women and the feel of community—the sharing and overlapping of damage—and love.”
-Joy Katz
Proceeds from this title support the Trevor Project.
Theater of Parts
by M. Mack
“M. Mack’s Theater of Parts is a cacophonous incision on the impossible body—a book of noses and nipples, of scars and wigs and wings. It’s bound in mesh and written in the politics of language and the language of tongues and the tongues of characters acting out the transformation of being. It is the spectacle of family and the drama of strangers, of impressions and pronouns and what it means to be ‘carving out a space for myself, inside myself.’ I finished the book and immediately read it again; Mack’s words are sharp, probing, and utterly unparalleled. Exeunt all.”
-Sonya Vatomsky
Proceeds from this title support Southerners on New Ground.
Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story
by Donna Vorreyer
“Haunted by sinuous love and death’s resounding presence, Donna Vorreyer finds a ‘language for this/ ache.’ Her poems magnify experience into wonderment, longing. Her startling imagery reveals an imagination that braids the actual and the magical. Time and again I was struck by linguistic pleasures. In one poem, corn silk becomes a gown. In another, the speaker says, ‘the moon has no/ hands to catch me.’ Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story is a riveting collection that reminds us love and grief, like fire and water, are elemental forces that summon both sorrow and song.”
-Eduardo Corral
Proceeds from this title support the Trevor Project.
Ha Ha Ha Thump
by Amorak Huey
“You don’t need to count how many times variations on ‘disappear’ and ‘disguise’ appear here to get the sense that Amorak Huey is not only a witty and keen-eyed poet but also a consummate magician, directing our gaze to one thing even as he prepares to show us something better. Thus one poem declares in its title that it is about wallpaper, not breasts. In another, the pope imagines himself a married man, and if that’s not magic, I don’t know what is. Like a 21st -century ‘Abracadabra!’ the phrase ‘ha ha ha thump’ serves as the title of this collection and then recurs as a poem title not once but five times, cracking the ordinary world open to reveal the wonders within.”
— David Kirby
Proceeds from this title support Planned Parenthood.
Stationed Near the Gateway
by Margaret Bashaar
“Some souls spin like maple seeds. Some books are as haunted as a hotel. ‘I have found the right magic for this,’ declares the opening poem, ‘and for speaking to the dead without fear.’ Each page of Stationed Near the Gateway turns over like a tarot card, introducing us to its cast: Mary and Claire, Percy, the Proprietor, the Monster, the Doctor, the Demon Hunter. Margaret Bashaar’s gift is in making each character’s desire feel at once elusive and revelatory. I love the grit and resilience of these poems, which—for all their commitment to memory—are really about moving on.”
-Sandra Beasley
Proceeds from this title support the ACLU.
Hallelujah for the Ghosties
by Melanie Jordan
“‘I am hand-stitched / to stand witness,’ the speaker in one of Melanie Jordan’s poems tells us, and this impressive debut collection, Hallelujah for the Ghosties, is intricately wrought, woven with rare and wonderful insights. Here, the poet looks into the places we resist, finding in them clarity and beauty, isolation and community. An antebellum portico, the speed of light, the tangled hands of a couple in a museum all serve as revelations in service to Jordan’s hard-earned awareness and sudden wit. This is poetry as artifact—thoughtful, gorgeous, and seamless.”
—Adrian Matejka
Proceeds from this title support the ACLU.
Exodus in X Minor
by Fox Frazier Foley
“Fox Frazier-Foley’s Exodus in X Minor offers us an extraordinary album of portraits drawn from the darkest reaches of upstate New York. Her broken figures are awash in drugs, death, and Spiritualism, and what hopes that have left seem raw and intimate, yet inevitably dangerous. The constellations of darkness that illuminate these poems begin to swirl into an accelerating vortex, and even the most righteous reader will have to face going down.”
– David St. John
Proceeds from this title support the ACLU.
The Hardship Post
by Jehanne Dubrow
“There’s a tensile strength of line here—predominantly pentameter—that underscores the ease of the poetic idiom: just as the heartfelt yet disciplined feeling—life of the content underwrites this collection’s larger themes of Judaism and its ancient traditions. The Hardship Post has a good deal on its mind as well as the load in its heart. Polish history and heritage may be one personal focus, but displacement and identity are the greater subjects. First books don’t usually take on the world at this level of seriousness and skill.”
-Stanley Plumly
Proceeds from this title support Planned Parenthood.
The Bone Folders
by TA Noonan
“This is incantation. Noonan speaks; spells and forms and formulae leap into being. Very new, very, very old: poetry begins with naming, then metamorphosis. Dickinson’s Letters to the World conjoins the ‘hello world’ introduction to Java and coffee ground soothsaying. ‘O’ the days begin, and they end with a loop, ‘until what it touches / / : becomes what is touched.'”
-Catherine Daly
Proceeds from this title support Stand With Standing Rock.
When I Wake It Will Be Forever
by Virginia Smith Rice
“Both shimmering and seething, haunted and haunting, the complex, dazzling contours of When I Wake It Will Be Forever beckon the reader with the imperative of ‘listen’; and we do, because Rice’s poems vibrate with a ‘voice thorned and singing / but not human.’ Like her poetic parentage—Desnos, Szymborska, Tranströmer and Csoóri—there is a wisdom contained in this work that transcends a singular being’s experience; ultimately elegiac, yet ‘lit by inner, hidden suns,’ this book is a stellate network of memory, loss, longing, silence, and voice. Often serving as witness (to an aunt’s suicide, a stranger’s suicide, ‘the suicide in my voice’) Rice pays tribute to the manifold ghosts that clamor inside us. This is one of the most solidly exquisite and lingering first books I’ve had the honor of reading.”
-Simone Muench
Proceeds from this title support the ACLU.
What Will Keep Us Alive
by Kristin LaTour
“Light a match and wander west.” I will do as these poems command willingly and eagerly, for Kristin LaTour is a poet who has something to say and isn’t afraid to say it. Fierce, funny, fearless, and finely-crafted, these are fabulous poems I will read, ponder, and share with friends, colleagues, and students again and again and again.
—Lesléa Newman
Proceeds from this title support Planned Parenthood.
One Perfect Bird
by Letitia Trent
“Reading these poems I was reminded of the voice and vision of Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. Similarly, the emotional and psychological rawness of human thought, as crafted by Letitia Trent in surprising, elusive, and innovative lines, startles us into a recognition so profound, we’re not entirely sure what we’re reading or if we’re reading. It’s a pleasing and unsettling experience–and I daresay, what literature should and can be.”
– Kathy Fagan
Proceeds from this title support the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Confluence
by Sandra Marchetti
“These poems are richly eloquent and delicately nuanced as they illuminate the enigmatic, as they shape language around the ineffable, as they articulate the realm that is the confluence of what Wallace Stevens called the real and the imagination. Sandra Marchetti’s Confluence is a wonderful debut.”
–Eric Pankey
Proceeds from this title support To Write Love on Her Arms.
Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets
edited by Nick McRae
Gathered: Contemporary Quaker Poets, the first anthology of its kind, seeks to give the best Quaker poets writing today a voice in contemporary letters. Many anthologies of writing from other spiritual traditions have been published in recent years, and this Quaker collection will be an important addition to the conversation. The poets presented in Gathered come from all points on the Quaker cultural spectrum. There are Quakers from all over the United States and Quakers from abroad. There are liberal Quakers and conservative Quakers. There are lifelong Quakers, Quakers from hybrid spiritual backgrounds, and those who were once part of Quaker society but have since moved on down other paths.
Proceeds from this title support Reconciling Ministries Network, an organization that advocates for full LGBTQ+ inclusion in the United Methodist Church.
You can also donate to Sundress Publications, a 501(c)3 nonprofit here.
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