Sara Deniz Akant's Hyperphantasia explores the sonnet's sonic and imaginative capabilities via infestation dreams, open tabs, and other disruptive forms of longing and (dis)belonging: the epistolary, epic, ballad, or just "some oracle shit" (history). Phanta—our AI BFF, echoing troll, or spiritual center—sweetly sings a "nekromantic soundtrack" into the reader's ear through the "holographic non-place" of dove-robots, sleeping boyfriends, murderous grooms, and empty code. In these broken songs, "the women haunt themselves" through the quotidian trappings of daily routine: unanswered letters, dreamscapes, and ritualized obsessions. And yet, Akant's celebratory second collection refuses to make precious bores of gender, grief, or lust. Just like the eponymous hero and prismatic villain of Phanta herself, the trash in these poems not only "sucks our hunger dry" but also "multiplies" in an attempt to reclaim the (often damning) myths that surround the culturally mixed, feminized body.

SARA DENIZ AKANT is a poet, educator, and performer. She is the author of three books — most recently, Hyperphantasia (Rescue Press 2022), which was a New York Times book of the year, a Boston Globe book of the year, and won the Massachusetts Book Award in poetry. She is also the author of Babette (Rescue Press 2015), winner of the Black Box Poetry Prize, and Parades (Omnidawn 2014), winner of the Chapbook Prize. She teaches poetry as a Professor of the Practice at Tufts University, and co-curates the Kan Yama Kan reading series in Brooklyn.

"Akant conjures the ancestral surrealism, something long before the word knew itself." - CACongrad

"There's a stubborn beauty in these pieces; the poems erupt the same moment they're read." - Hala Alyan

"Sara Deniz Akant is a kind of witch, and this book forges a new genre of alchemical realism." - Chris Kraus

"One of the most thrilling books I've read in a while… The poems reminded me both of John Berryman's 'Dream Songs'… and of the Gurlesque school of the aughts, its grotesque camp." - Elisa Gabbert

"Akant sets up camp in the uncanny valley between the proliferating artificial intelligences that quietly curate what we can and can't see and the now-you-see-me-now-you-don't artifice of poetic techniques, out of which, we can almost swear, a real voice speaks…. As in comedy, Akant offers a yes-and logic of grief." - Noah Warren