{"title":"Lightscatter Press","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"eveningful-poems","title":"Eveningful: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e is interested in thresholds: the sky-smear between night and day, the rift between the speaker's interior mind and the outward world. While evening's movement from day to night is fluid and natural, the speaker finds the act of blending the self with the world—its people, its landscapes, its incidental moments—requires much more deliberate effort. These poems follow the speaker through observations and experiences, often occurring during nighttime, as she navigates two parallel desires: to be seen and understood and also the desire to see more clearly.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThese desires reveal their complexities. \u003cem\u003eHow\u003c\/em\u003e do we cross the threshold from aloneness to connection? To that end, these poems are concerned with the process of \u003cem\u003edepicting\u003c\/em\u003e the mind's interior. Each poem is grounded in the mental (and emotional) processes of contemplation and description, exploring the anxieties and realities that make vulnerability difficult for young women. Like turning a ceramic in our hands to ensure all its angles and details are known, the speaker presents various deliberations on connection and solitude, both their dangers and allures. Through this scrutiny and assemblage, \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e shows how a self can construct strength and how that strength can bridge thresholds as we work to know and be known.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eWhile capturing the movements of a single mind, another layer of these poems is that they often reveal themselves as poems: as constructed vessels of experience where the speaker can turn to another, the reader, and perhaps find understanding. Throughout the collection, the speaker shapes and defines the lyric space to explore disclosure and understanding on her own terms. In this way, \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e invites the reader's active participation in a very human rhythm: opening ourselves up to another's vulnerability. A process we're lucky to move through again and again—like day melding into night.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eJennifer Whalen\u003c\/strong\u003e (she\/her) is a poet and educator from the Northern Kentucky\/Cincinnati, Ohio area. Her poems can be found in \u003cem\u003eGulf Coast, Denver Quarterly, Southern Indiana Review, New South, Bodega, The Boiler, Grist,\u003c\/em\u003e \u0026amp; elsewhere. She received her B.A. from Northern Kentucky University where she studied writing, literature, and film studies. She received her M.F.A. from Texas State University where upon graduation she served as writer-in-residence at the university's Clark House (2015-2016). She currently teaches English at the University of Illinois Springfield. \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e is her first book.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Poised between Eliot's love song and Myles's snapshot, Whalen's poems have an aching passion. Like the whip-poor-will and balloons of the morning after, they keep dazzling me back into an alertness towards my own intimate life. \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e is about elation and sorrow and the way they can happen almost at the same time, together. The poems are about an avid delight, yes: 'Like sleeping \/ in someone's favorite sweater, waking up \/ with its fine threads in my mouth.' And also yes: 'Sometimes the rain \/ has to start, then stop. Your life will be full \/ of something; that will have to be enough.' Among the poems in \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e are three titled 'It's Seven,' 'It's Nine,' and 'It's Twelve.' Which is to say, the evening is always getting later and deeper, like the heart or like adulthood, arriving at the other side of the night as always: 'I wanted morning to be bright: a few puddles the sun hadn't scorched out, grass greener, vines vinier, the day swollen with plump \u0026amp; me, necessary form among forms: the rivulets of a skirt made more lovely with wind's wavering. But it was just morning. Long dry clear singing morning.'\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Rick Barot\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003e\"Eveningful\u003c\/em\u003e is lush with earfuls and eyefuls, with arrangements of bodies social and intimate in a world Jennifer Whalen navigates with her understanding that attention is most interesting when one's body is not easily defined. Her assertive, directive, sometimes funny voice rallies asstrongly with need as with claim staking. Nothing happens gradually here; splitting what stands from what it stands for makes for a poetic most trusting of immediacy, with a voice that cannot, like things can, drift and waft, but it can, in quick time, wholly 'visualize\/the world through bits\/of paper:…'. The teensy, the sip, the flash have great power here. Whalen's precise lines make longing palpable with 'dying candles', or 'a single down feather' and bring dance back to 'polka dots'. Here, mutually, 'a breeze is fervor', and a 'blow dryer' have significance. \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e has arrived to show us how 'a body can be a fastened\/clasp-latch thing'. These poems are wonderfully bright, serious, and sexy like nobody else's.\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Kathleen Peirce\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"In \u003cem\u003eEveningful\u003c\/em\u003e, Jennifer Whalen sets out the world as an array of possibilities, any one of which might suddenly light up with need of urgent consideration. Love is frequent among them, as well as how love does and does not transform a day (or night's) various arrangements. Reading these poems feels a bit like falling in love, in fact, as if the ground has given way and yet everything it had supported still hovers in place, glimmering with strange particulars that permit us—at last!—to perceive them for the first time.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eHeather Christie\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Lightscatter Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48904888385853,"sku":"9781736483541","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781736483541ita.jpg?v=1717708577"},{"product_id":"bewildered-by-all-this-broken-sky-poems-by-anna-scotti","title":"Bewildered by All This Broken Sky: Poems by Anna Scotti","description":"\u003cp\u003ePoet Anna Scotti's collection, \u003cem\u003eBewildered by All This Broken Sky\u003c\/em\u003e, is the winner of the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, awarded in 2020. The poems in this book help us to see the miraculous in the broken, the everyday, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness. Poems from this stunning collection have recently appeared in \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eYemassee\u003c\/em\u003e, and have won the Pocataligo Prize for poetry (selected by Nikky Finney) and the Marc Fischer Prize for poetry (selected by Chris Ransick). Ellen Bass says, of \u003cem\u003eBewildered\u003c\/em\u003e: \"I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Heaven is \"my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats,\" \"a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smelling of perfume and cash.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eScotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe—all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. \"Then Fall Again\" travels from the \"gold, crunch, crisp\" of fall to \"Buds furled tight along the branch,\" and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In \"T'es Pas Seule\", the speaker comforts a car crash victim \"in every language I can muster...Todo está bien. Tranquille, chérie.T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone.\" Frank Gaspar says: \"I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. \u003cem\u003eBewildered By All This Broken Sky\u003c\/em\u003e is a living world unto itself—a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the \"horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers,\" and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, \"gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows.\" The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eAnna Scotti\u003c\/strong\u003e's poetry has appeared in \u003cem\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/em\u003e since 2016, and has been awarded a number of prizes and honors. \u003cem\u003eBewildered by All This Broken Sky\u003c\/em\u003e, her first collection of poems, was awarded the inaugural Lightscatter Press Prize, and was selected by Katherine Coles. Her short stories are regulars in \u003cem\u003eEllery Queen Mystery Magazine\u003c\/em\u003e and elsewhere. Anna's novella, \u003cem\u003eBIG and BAD\u003c\/em\u003e, is available everywhere now. See home page for links to purchase. A former journalist, Anna has written for national and regional magazines including \u003cem\u003eInStyle, People, The Los Angeles Times Traveling in Style, Bon Appetit, Los Angeles, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, Ladies' Home Journal, YM,\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eSugar\u003c\/em\u003e. She was a foreign correspondent for \u003cem\u003eWhoWeekly\u003c\/em\u003e (Australia) and a columnist for the late, great \u003cem\u003eBuzz: The Talk of Los Angeles\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Imagine dangling your feet in a cold stream after a strenuous hike in the sun. You're relaxed and happy, but the day is clouded by loss because it's the anniversary of something terrible you suffered long ago. As you sigh into a light breeze, you have a long-awaited insight into your past experience. That scenario approximates the physical and mental space of Bewildered by All This Broken Sky, Anna Scotti's debut collection of poems. 'How odd, to find myself the villain, and never know until this moment. I'll admit I was a barefoot slattern of a mother; I'll admit I should have kept that fat hand tucked tight within my own,' she writes in 'Now That I Have Known Loss,' one of the book's many prose poems. Scotti's approach is sweet yet dark, accessible yet achingly strange. She gets at motherhood's complexities, like how you can never truly know your children, even as you know them better than anyone else ever will. And she elucidates the particular love that parents know and that other adults cannot. But instead of shutting such readers out or preaching about parenthood as a higher calling, she presents it as a sad and lovely curse you take on willingly. 'Last night you came to me, barefoot,\/nightgown damp and twisted with sleep,\/and said you'd lost a thing with four rooms\/and no doors,' she writes in 'Feathers of Gold,' about a child's nightmare. 'That's easy, I said. Your heart.'\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Jennifer Levin\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I imagine Anna Scotti observing from within a snow globe without the snow but with 'the sun…beating glitter from the sidewalk, scattering diamonds in our path.' She steps outside of a moment, anoints it with clarity, and builds a lifetime into just one poem. Scotti's attentiveness encourages the reader to commit to a vigilant eye. The precision and complexity of the poems urge me to read again and again. Otherwise, I fear I may miss something: a number in the combination lock of Bewildered By All This Broken Sky. Lines that repeat throughout the collection give the reader a more holistic understanding each time: 'soul of the bear,' or 'that thing you did.' But the most powerful anaphora in this collection is the repetition of loss as hauntingly familiar as the Jaws soundtrack. Immediately evident is the vulnerability of the mother in her relationship to her child and the way her heart is a constant casualty to time. Loss dapples the mother's experience. By the time a moment registers, it is already a memory. In 'Nine,' the speaker comments while watching their daughter, 'It's almost lost, this ability to be lost \/ in soil, water, leaves, and folded flower petals.' Scotti consistently anchors the reader in the ethereal qualities of love and loss through concrete images, thereby giving language to the ineffable. This poet suspends us in the past, the future, and the present—ever aware of the loss that living demands, yet somehow makes it not just palatable, but desirable.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eAngela Dribben\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Poet Ellen Bass describes Scotti's poems as '[work that] helps us to see the miraculous in the broken, the every day, the ordinary, and are suffused with radiant language and deep kindness.' ... I was struck by the feeling of goodbye in these readings: forget-me-nots and loved ones passed, the bitter sting of a partner changed, blame and doubt and anxiety and guilt. These poems are ghosts or whispers of memory. And yet it is magic in glimpses, the sound of laughter and tinkling bells. We feel support in shared sadness. Anna Scotti's language comforts us that we are not isolated against the cruel beauty of this maddening world. So, like pieces of stained glass, the characters in this collection come together to make up all this broken sky, and you—the reader—are solidified somewhere between it. Scotti features images of the mundane and everyday passing members of society but she reminds us that they each have their own story. These poems are vulnerable at their core while still striking universality. These poems are for neighbors, for strangers, for anyone who wants to see their experience reflected in someone else. I recommend Bewildered by All This Broken Sky to anyone who needs to laugh, to cry, or to dream.\" -\u003cstrong\u003e Sierra Thoemmes\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I can only describe Bewildered, Anna Scotti's debut poetry collection, by saying I fell in love. Suffused with beauty, pulsing with life, these poems invite us to see the ordinary, the broken, as miraculous. Heaven is 'my sisters stalking and hissing like jealous cats,'' a leather handbag, creased and cracked and smelling of perfume and cash.' Scotti is a welcoming poet, her lines full of extended family, workmen, strangers, dogs, fish, birds, horses, even a giraffe—all so vivid they seem to exist off the page. Her prose poems are small masterpieces. 'Then Fall Again' travels from the 'gold, crunch, crisp' of fall to 'Buds furled tight along the branch,' and back around again. Yet, beyond even these pleasures, what opens our hearts is the book's deep seated kindness. In 'T'es Pas Seule,'the speaker comforts a car crash victim 'in every language I can muster...Todo está bien. Tranquille, chérie. T'es pas seule. Rest easy, rest easy, you aren't, just yet, alone.'\" - \u003cstrong\u003eEllen Bass\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"I am one of those fortunate people who can say that I have known Anna Scotti's poetry for many years. Hers is a voice that permeates her work with such definition that the reader comes to know the poems as intimate gestures, a circling of truths. It is exhilarating to absorb the energy of this poetry. Bewildered By All This Broken Sky is a living world unto itself—a place in the universe where you will dwell in a consciousness that contains, well...multitudes, including the 'horned-rimmed god of unfinished term papers,' and people who forage in the city dawn beneath skyscrapers, 'gathering the birds that have crashed the great walls of mirrored windows.' The deft surprises go on and on, and you'll want to read this book forever.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eFrank X. Gaspar\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Lightscatter Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48909832028477,"sku":"9781736483503","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781736483503ita.jpg?v=1717786508"},{"product_id":"undershore-poems","title":"UNDERSHORE: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eUndershore\u003c\/em\u003e examines the speaker's ongoing grief following the loss of her mother to breast cancer against the backdrop of a sustained engagement with the natural world. The manuscript is structured around a series of \"visitations\"—imagined encounters with the poet's mother after her death. The title \"\u003cem\u003eUndershore\u003c\/em\u003e\" is meant to describe the location of these visitations—littoral, submerged, oneiric—a space that is interior to the self while also at the edge of the self—intimate and peripheral—like the voice. Grief, in the speaker's experience, comes in waves, and so the title that conveys the tidal nature of the mother's returning to her, her constant glimmering in and out of daily existence. To mimic this movement, the visitations occur at loosely regular intervals throughout the manuscript, the book turning with each of the mother's returns. In between each poem titled \"Visitation\" are nestled other poems, some tightly-wound lyrics, some diffuse, floaty poems—all fascinated by the botanical world, by the shoreline, by desire, by intimacy and grief, and by the unexpected and inevitable way these concerns bleed into one another. The collection finds the ephemerality of the flower as it moves through its cycle of bloom and decay (and finally, sometimes, fruit) compounds and enriches the tidal movement of the work. Gardens and oceans hide things; both have depths, shades, shallows. The book finds an appeal and fascination in their shared habit of containing secrets. These poems invite the reader into hidden spaces, into an undershore, without fully disclosing its secrets.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eKelly Hoffer \u003c\/strong\u003eis a poet and book artist. Her poetry was recognized as a finalist for the National Poetry Series in both 2020 and 2021. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and a PhD in Literatures in English from Cornell University. She currently teaches in the MFA program at the University of Michigan as the Helen Zell Visiting Professor in Poetry.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"One of Anna Atkins's cyanotypes wraps around the cover of Kelly Hoffer's UNDERSHORE. Amongst Hoffer's poems are QR codes—looking themselves like dappled shadows—leading to images of cyanotype squares, also made by the poet. Hoffer's cyanotypes contain botanical prints of her own, alongside scraps of language, and squares and triangles of shadow. Viewed as a group, each square suggests traditional quilt block patterns—fittingly, these cyanotypes were sewn into a paper quilt that Hoffer brought along on many stops of her book tour. UNDERSHORE, as you can perhaps already imagine, is rich in media and rich with resonance. The lines between material and ineffable things—between shadow and object, light and paper, breath and fabric, digital and material, needle and paper—slip and hitch throughout the collection, and I am left with the lingering impression of, well, impressions. The acts of pressing, imprinting, shadowing, and piercing recur across the poems, mirrored in their visual supplements. In UNDERSHORE, many threads are available for pulling. Here, the one I've picked up is the sequence of poems each entitled 'Visitation,' which are scattered throughout the expansive collection. The 'Visitation' poems narrate appearances, across dreams and half-memories, of the speaker's mother, who is dead. It is as if these poems, too, are attempting to record a shadow.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eLindsey Webb\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"'That's the intimacy I'm interested in,' Kelly Hoffer told me on the phone, a few months before the release of her debut poetry collection. I hadn't seen her in over decade, but from the get-go our conversation was breezy and deep. She told me the proximity of sex and grief in her work made some of her peer readers uncomfortable. 'For me,' she said, 'it's actually kind of the thing.' Hoffer's mother died a few years before the earliest poems were written and the collection is punctuated by eight poems called 'Visitation,' each a dream about a ghost. As it goes with dreams, earthly reason spirals into a stranger logic: 'We lie on the bed and talk of the luxury of clean sheets. she starts stripping the mattress. I jostle to avoid the small birds of her hands. When she finishes she folds up and tucks herself into a ceramic basin smaller than a loaf of bread.' In between visitations are poems that reckon with life, ruled by seemingly contradictory forces. It's this tension—between grief and joy, sex and death, hope and haunting—that holds the book together. Undershore came out this past May with Lightscatter Press, a publisher that incorporates technology into text. Each poem features a tiny QR code that leads to a website explaining the project. On the website, each poem also corresponds with a piece of a cyanotype quilt, forty-nine paper squares on a blue-white spectrum sitting at the bottom of the web page, and a recording of the author reading the poem.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eOlivia Durif\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Shades of blue and species of flowers accumulate throughout Undershore. The poem 'Newly, rendered, truly' launches with the description of 'newly, truly, bluely ever madly, sadly, \/ blue blue blue, raw and bluely \/ piece of meat, awfully raw and \/ tender.' The poem concludes in 'my singly, madly, deepening \/ blue.' The blue shows up in the sky, the water, and the darkness in this collection, as we see 'the bending of true \/ cyan.' The ache of this blue aligns with other poems, sometimes the same poems, that examine the growth of flowers. In 'Peony,' there is 'no \/ you to witness the unfolding.' Instead, the poet perceives 'the very sepal \/ tired of holding \/ all the petals that must be inside.' Throughout Undershore are multiple poems entitled 'Visitation' where the poet meets her mother:my mother tells meshe has read my poems.she liked the one about peonies because she likespoems about the end of the world, she says.These poems of the same title feel dreamlike, and they don't necessarily mean a visitation in a funereal sense but rather that of encounters with her mother's ghost. They process the absence. In the last 'Visitation,' Hoffer writes, 'We emerge from a drowned place, just she and I.' This connection to the loved one also brings the 'Grief for the grief I must give up.' Even grief cannot last forever, and it evolves, as 'She continues \/ pulling seeds from a stitched \/ rose, disintegrating to become \/ a nest.'\" - \u003cstrong\u003eMartha Stuit\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Undershore is incandescent, like an electric light housing a filament which glows when a current passes through it. A filament as tender and tenacious as spider silk weathering the elements. Its lyrical adroitness is immediately felt and heard...  The objective correlative of this collection encompasses much of the floral and natural world, yielding sites of transcendent linguistic turns. After a death comes a 'disrupted texture,' but in mapping the body with the natural world, the speaker finds a way to move forward, as clouds are never not moving, as plants continue to grow toward the sun, until the day that they don't. Never will I forget this speaker: 'try to shape my mouth a poppy \/ ringed with dew, my neck a greening nape. I come \/ off inelegant–-something borrowed, something \/ burrowed. unseemly, lustering.' Yet in these vulnerable admissions of self, and statements of sheer longing, the poet's sightline is unerringly honest, seeking, and true.\" - \u003cstrong\u003eDiana Khoi Nguyễn\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"The edges in Kelly Hoffer's vibrant poems are sharpened with delight: the 'neon crocus \/ knocks your skirt up'! This stunning debut collection brims with the physicality of desire and loss as it tracks the complex imprints and entanglements of embodied experience. Attending to both the disorientation and anchoring of conscious life, these poems reverberate with emergent realities: the felt properties of the bloom, the apparition, the lush shores and ledges of evolutionary knowledge, even the shifting cusps of denotative meaning that rise and fall through the pages of the dictionary. The afterlife of each felt space opens up a vivid inner elsewhere that locates us right here, in the fiery light of 'the un- \/dead side of the river.'\" - \u003cstrong\u003eElizabeth Willis\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c!----\u003e","brand":"Lightscatter Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48909858734397,"sku":"9781736483527","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781736483527ita.jpg?v=1717787309"},{"product_id":"reading-water-poems","title":"Reading Water: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eFramed by the death of the poet's mother, \u003ci\u003eReading Water\u003c\/i\u003e begins by considering how love is born then bound by the bonds of family and friends. These poems undertake a restless search for a self under constant evolution. Grappling with grief, familial and romantic love, and art - using persona and ekphrasis, along with the traditional lyric - this debut collection addresses Dean Young's crucial question: \"Who doesn't sense an unbridgeable alienation between ourselves and the world…That our poems speak to no one, not even fully to ourselves?\"\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn response to this question, over and over again, \u003ci\u003eReading Water\u003c\/i\u003e fords the distance that exists between sons, brothers, parents, friends, and lovers—giving voice to the what's unsayable in these relationships. In three sections, the book moves backwards through time, forming an arc that begins with loss, moving on to desire and a beloved, before concluding with propulsive pieces about art and ekphrasis. In these sections, the poet moves from a place of support and community to one of solitude.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis collection considers how we are made, before thinking about what it takes to become a writer or artist, and if solitude is a prerequisite for creation. Images of water's ephemerality, what happens above and below its surface, thread \u003ci\u003eReading Water\u003c\/i\u003e together. This collection finds kinship in the work of poets like Brenda Shaughnessy, Nick Flynn, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, Gail Mazur, and Alan Shapiro.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lightscatter Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50054536560957,"sku":"9781962206211","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/25d923b7c4b291416ef32b998da7bd23.jpg?v=1743095724"},{"product_id":"mercury-in-reggaeton-poem","title":"Mercury in Reggaetón: Poem","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eMercury in Reggaetón\u003c\/i\u003e was written after the poet suffered after the worst breakup of his life within the same month-span Trump won the first election. The book aims was to capture the particular political-psycho-sexual turmoil of the author's early twenties. At the time of these poems' writing, the author was in grad school leading an undocumented student group and the fight for a sanctuary campus in a deeply red state. He was uncovering his own pansexuality and gender fluidity and deepening my understanding of his racial and national identities. In this way, many of the poems have coming-of-age \"first book\" energy. The poems narrate wrestles with identity, frustration with the politics of our era, and how both of those elements infused erotic experiences. The poet wrote to reflect the emotional flood that is at its most raw and visceral in one's young adulthood, aiming to capture the fury most poignantly and painfully expressed in radical LGBTQ+ and\/or POC young adults, struggling to heal from their intergenerational wounds while confronting an increasingly hostile and horrifying world. There's a particular kind of anger that fuels them, but will kill them if they don't find gentler or sturdier ways of holding it. The poems and songs were created between 2012 and 2023, from 19 to 30.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn a formal level, the poet fully embraces the musicality and rhythm intrinsic to the hip-hop and spoken word roots of his voice and pursued it both in content and form with songs dedicated to and explicitly alluding to the work of rappers, as well as actual songs included in the book. The poet's bilingualism is a literal manifestation of the cultural clashes inherit to his identity as a queer Salvadoran. The writing tends to shatter any sense of stylistic fidelity or tonal decorum, shifting between strict formal poetry and neat, tightly line-broken stanzas to raps and the more rant-like verse common in spoken word spaces.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePart of what gives the collection its depth is its rootedness in history, culture, and community. The poet borrows and transforms the form of popular works by rappers and poets alike, and shouts out and directly collaborates with contemporaries like Janel Pineda and Zac Ivie. These voices cocoon the collection in its artistic neighborhood. In content, the poet slingshots between the present, the history of la Conquista, and the history of the past century. Historical trauma, like any other, has a tendency to intrude onto the present and jumble up your sense of time. The poems about la Conquista, in particular, provide a historic heft that helps the collection surpass its youthful emotional landscape. It provides context to the struggles, both internal and political, the protagonist navigates. There's a sort of sublime in the powerlessness felt in the almost deterministic weight that our historic, intergenerational, and personal trauma carries in these times that the poet tries to capture and confront: thus, the title \u003ci\u003eMercury in Reggaetón\u003c\/i\u003e, which nods to the astrological phenomena many people associate with social and interpersonal turmoil, flipped to introduce reggaeton, a bluntly sexual, Latinx genre that recently has been subverted by lesbians and queer rappers, such as Rebeca Lane, Audry Funk, Chocolate Remix, and others to articulate a rageful politics leading with an in-your-face twerk.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Lightscatter Press","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":51647869583677,"sku":"9781962206334","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9781962206334ita.jpg?v=1777408454"}],"url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/collections\/lightscatter-press.oembed","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}